Publishing Musicologal Research in the 21st Century

FAIN: CH-50421-07

American Musicological Society, Inc. (New York, NY 10012-1502)
Anne W. Robertson (Project Director: May 2006 to November 2011)

Endowment for publication subventions and an award program in musicology as well as fund-raising costs.

The American Musicological Society seeks an NEH challenge grant of $240,000, which with a 4:1 match will yield $1,200,000. These funds will endow four publication-related initiatives of the Society. The bulk of the funds ($900,000) will create a new subvention supporting the publication of first books by young scholars, whose work often represents the cutting edge of scholarly research, but whose careers are often at their most fragile or challenging point. The remainder will go primarily to existing publication subvention programs, supporting musicological books more generally ($125,000) as well as a monograph series sponsored by the Society ($100,000). These subventions aim to optimize the quality of the best scholarly books on music while keeping their prices affordable. Finally, we propose a new award for books on music in American culture ($50,000), a vital area of musical research that appeals to the broadest literary and musical public.

Media Coverage

Review: Douglas W. Shadle’s ‘Orchestrating the Nation’ (Review)
Author(s): David Allen
Publication: New York Times
Date: 12/28/2015
Abstract: Book review
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/books/review-douglas-w-shadles-orchestrating-the-nation.html

Associated Products

Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Book)
Title: Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane
Author: Franya Berkman
Abstract: Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels. In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual community in Southern California. Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Monument Eternal illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6924-0.html
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8195-69

Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Book)
Title: Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz
Author: Todd Decker
Abstract: Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made a significant contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of Astaire’s work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and analyzes Astaire’s creative relationships with the greats, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire’s collaborations with African American musicians and his work with lesser known professionals—arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and performers.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268906
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520268883

Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (Book)
Title: Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years
Author: Sabine Feisst
Abstract: Arnold Schoenberg was a polarizing figure in twentieth century music, and his works and ideas have had considerable and lasting impact on Western musical life. A refugee from Nazi Europe, he spent an important part of his creative life in the United States (1933-1951), where he produced a rich variety of works and distinguished himself as an influential teacher. However, while his European career has received much scholarly attention, surprisingly little has been written about the genesis and context of his works composed in America, his interactions with Americans and other emigres, and the substantial, complex, and fascinating performance and reception history of his music in this country. Author Sabine Feisst illuminates Schoenberg's legacy and sheds a corrective light on a variety of myths about his sojourn. Looking at the first American performances of his works and the dissemination of his ideas among American composers in the 1910s, 1920s and early 1930s, she convincingly debunks the myths surrounding Schoenberg's alleged isolation in the US. Whereas most previous accounts of his time in the US have portrayed him as unwilling to adapt to American culture, this book presents a more nuanced picture, revealing a Schoenberg who came to terms with his various national identities in his life and work. Feisst dispels lingering negative impressions about Schoenberg's teaching style by focusing on his methods themselves as well as on his powerful influence on such well-known students as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Dika Newlin. Schoenberg's influence is not limited to those who followed immediately in his footsteps-a wide range of composers, from Stravinsky adherents to experimentalists to jazz and film composers, were equally indebted to Schoenberg, as were key figures in music theory like Milton Babbitt and David Lewin. In sum, Schoenberg's New World contributes to a new understanding of one of the most important pioneers of musical modernism.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Music/MusicHistoryWestern/TwentiethCentury/?view=usa&ci=9780195372380
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195372380

Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Book)
Title: Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila
Author: David R. M. Irving
Abstract: In this groundbreaking study, D. R. M. Irving reconnects the Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern Hispanic world. For some two and a half centuries, the Philippine Islands were firmly interlinked to Latin America and Spain through transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and culture. The city of Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital intercultural nexus and a significant conduit for the regional diffusion of Western music. Within its ethnically diverse society, imported and local musics played a crucial role in the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines and in propelling the work of Roman Catholic missionaries in neighboring territories. Manila's religious institutions resounded with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of the indigenous and immigrant populations in complex forms of artistic interaction and opposition. Multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities, and Irving uses the metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony to critique musical practices within the colonial milieu. He argues that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under Spanish rule. He also contends that the active appropriation of music and dance by the indigenous population constituted a significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained "enharmonic engagement" between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Music/WorldMusicEthnomusicology/?view=usa&ci=9780195378269
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195378269

Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (Book)
Title: Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia
Author: Richard Jankowsky
Abstract: In Stambeli, Richard C. Jankowsky presents a vivid ethnographic account of the healing trance music created by the descendants of sub-Saharan slaves brought to Tunisia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stambeli music calls upon an elaborate pantheon of sub-Saharan spirits and North African Muslim saints to heal humans through ritualized trance. Based on nearly two years of participation in the musical, ritual, and social worlds of stambeli musicians, Jankowsky’s study explores the way the music evokes the cross-cultural, migratory past of its originators and their encounters with the Arab-Islamic world in which they found themselves. Stambeli, Jankowsky avers, is thoroughly marked by a sense of otherness—the healing spirits, the founding musicians, and the instruments mostly come from outside Tunisia—which creates a unique space for profoundly meaningful interactions between sub-Saharan and North African people, beliefs, histories, and aesthetics. Part ethnography, part history of the complex relationship between Tunisia’s Arab and sub-Saharan populations, Stambeli will be welcomed by scholars and students of ethnomusicology, anthropology, African studies, and religion.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo9299440.html
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-226-392

Umm Kulthum: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007 (Book)
Title: Umm Kulthum: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007
Author: Laura Lohmann
Abstract: In 1967 Egypt and the Arab world suffered a devastating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War. Though long past the age at which most singers would have retired, the sexagenarian Egyptian singer Umm Kulth m launched a multifaceted response to the defeat that not only sustained her career, but also expanded her international fame and shaped her legacy. By examining biographies, dramas, monuments, radio programming practices, and recent recordings, Laura Lohman delves into Umm Kulth m’s role in fashioning her image and the conflicting ways that her image and music have been interpreted since her death in 1975.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.upne.com/0819570710.html
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8195-70

Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth Century America (Book)
Title: Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth Century America
Author: Nancy Newman
Abstract: $80.00 Availability: Available Quantity: Share Email a friend or librarian Add to Wish List [Printer Friendly Page] In Good Music for a Free People, author Nancy Newman examines the activities and reception of the Germania Musical Society, an orchestra whose members emigrated from Berlin during the Revolutions of 1848. These two dozen "Forty-Eighters" gave nearly a thousand concerts in North America during the ensuing six-year period, possibly reaching a million listeners. Drawing on a memoir by member Henry Albrecht, Newman provides insights into the musicians' desire to bring their music to the audiences of a democratic republic at this turbulent time. Eager to avoid the egotism and self-promotion of the European patronage system, they pledged to work for their mutual interests both musically and socially. "One for all, and all for one" became their motto. Originally published in German, Albrecht's memoir is presented here in for the first time in translation.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13434
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer/University of Rochester Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781580463454

Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Book)
Title: Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits
Author: Benjamin Piekut
Abstract: In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by “experimental” in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time—New York City, 1964—Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt’s demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268517
Primary URL Description: Publisher's web site
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520268500

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Book)
Title: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
Author: George E. Lewis
Abstract: Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.
Year: 2008
Primary URL: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5504497.html
Primary URL Description: Publisher web site
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226476957

Prizes

Music in American Culture Award
Date: 11/1/2009
Organization: American Musicological Society
Abstract: The Music in American Culture Award honors each year a book of exceptional merit that both illuminates some important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context. The goal of this award is to recognize the best writing on music in American culture, regardless of the source or intended audience of that writing; hence work by a broad range of authors—including performing musicians, journalists, and music critics, as well as academic scholars—will be considered.

Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Book)
Title: Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Author: Robin D. G. Kelley
Abstract: THELONIOUS MONK is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest com­posers. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Thelonious-Monk/Robin-Kelley/9781439190463
Primary URL Description: Publisher web site
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781439190463

Prizes

Music in American Culture Award
Date: 11/1/2010
Organization: American Musicological Society
Abstract: The Music in American Culture Award honors each year a book of exceptional merit that both illuminates some important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context. The goal of this award is to recognize the best writing on music in American culture, regardless of the source or intended audience of that writing; hence work by a broad range of authors—including performing musicians, journalists, and music critics, as well as academic scholars—will be considered.

I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (Book)
Title: I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America
Author: Albin J. Zak III
Abstract: The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll. The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist. The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans—all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=295986
Primary URL Description: Publisher web site
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-472-116

Prizes

Music in American Culture Award
Date: 11/1/2011
Organization: American Musicological Society
Abstract: The Music in American Culture Award honors each year a book of exceptional merit that both illuminates some important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context. The goal of this award is to recognize the best writing on music in American culture, regardless of the source or intended audience of that writing; hence work by a broad range of authors—including performing musicians, journalists, and music critics, as well as academic scholars—will be considered.

Quintette for Piano and String Quartet (Book)
Title: Quintette for Piano and String Quartet
Author: Leo Ornstein
Editor: Michael Broyles
Editor: Denise Von Glahn
Abstract: Leo Ornstein was a wildly famous Russian-American pianist-composer who in the late 1910s simultaneously outraged and riveted audiences with his unprecedented dissonant piano works and then unexpectedly surprised them when he dropped out of sight to pursue a quieter life of composition and teaching. In 1927 Ornstein returned to the spotlight with a new work, his Quintette for Piano and Strings (Op. 92). Here was a piece of breadth and scope reflective of a mature musical mind. Its lyricism and super-charged expressivity seemed to be in sharp contrast to the hammering physicality of Danse Sauvage or Suicide in an Airplane, two of the show-stoppers from his days as a touring virtuoso. But what many perceived to be a regression in style was in fact an expansion of that earlier voice, now more reflective, more thoughtful, and more finished. Ornstein’s Quintette for Piano and Strings is an impassioned work that reveals the raw emotions of a proudly intuitive composer. It is a worthy companion to the quintets of Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák, Frank, Fauré, and Bloch, and like them it will stand the test of time.
Year: 2005
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895795700

American Victorian Choral Music (Book)
Title: American Victorian Choral Music
Author: Dudley Bock
Editor: N. Lee Orr
Abstract: This MUSA volume makes an important contribution to American music studies by presenting a scholarly edition of selected choral works by Dudley Buck (1839–1909). Buck was arguably the finest composer of choral music among the group of musicians who had come of age by the end of the Civil War. The works chosen for this volume, some of which became icons of American Victorian culture, represent the three most popular choral genres during the Gilded Age: the anthem, the sacred and secular cantata, and the partsong. All of the works included here found immediate publication and stayed in print well into the twentieth century. Buck's works became the standards, not only by their intrinsic merit, but owing to their widespread performance throughout the country. His services, canticles, anthems, and hymns—musically engaging, well-crafted, and often genuinely moving—were considerably more professional than the homegrown music in use when he began his work. Included here are three works, a hymn anthem ("Rock of Ages"), a liturgical text ("Festival Te Deum No. 7 in E-flat"), and a late, through-composed work ("Grant to Us Thy Grace"). Buck's sacred and secular cantatas along with his partsongs also enjoyed widespread success among the growing number of church choirs and community choral groups. The two partsongs come from his earliest and latest periods. "In Absence" represents the early Victorian partsong, and the second, "The Signal Resounds from Afar" is both Buck's longest partsong and the one showing the greatest contrapuntal complexity. Both The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, written for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, and the Forty-Sixth Psalm, from 1872, are in full score and typify some of the finest cantata writing in Victorian America.
Year: 2005
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895795731

Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941 (Book)
Title: Selected Piano Solos, 1928-1941
Author: Earl "Fatha" Hines
Editor: Jeffrey Taylor
Abstract: As accompanist, ensemble player, and soloist, Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903–83) revolutionized the role of the piano in jazz. This publication focuses on his solo artistry and includes complete transcriptions of twelve solo recordings made by Hines between 1928 and 1941. These pieces show how Hines integrated stride, blues, novelty piano, and Western classical music with the work of other improvising soloists (especially trumpeter Louis Armstrong) to develop an innovative and highly personal style that continues to influence jazz pianists today. The thirteen-year span of the edition will allow scholars to trace the development of Hines's improvisational approach and evaluate how Hines adapted to the changing stylistic language of the 1930s and early 1940s. Alternate versions of two improvisations are included to show how Hines approached the same tune in subsequent performances. A tune history, discography, and stylistic commentary for each piece is provided, as well as a prefatory essay examining Hines's life and career, his piano style, and his role in the development of the jazz piano solo as a genre.
Year: 2006
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895795809

Complete Wind Chamber Music (Book)
Title: Complete Wind Chamber Music
Author: David Moritz Michael
Editor: Nola Reed Knouse
Abstract: The Complete Wind Chamber Music of David Moritz Michael includes sixteen multi-movement works in this volume that are based on manuscript sources and edited by Nola Reed Knouse, who has been director of research of programs for the Moravian Music Foundation since 1992. Scorings for the works (as with the familiar Harmoniemusik) begin with paired clarinets, horns, and one or two bassoon parts, and to this basic ensemble a single trumpet or flute is sometimes added. Michael (1751-1827) trained as a bandsman in Westphalia before he joined the Moravian Church and moved to the USA, where he spent most of life teaching in and composing music for various Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania. As Knouse states in her introductory essay, Moravian music in general is noteworthy because of its craftsmanship, musicality, and sincere portrayal of spiritual values, and these works are representative of this standard. Written for capable amateurs, these works generally avoid virtuosic display, but they are never simplistic or condescending.
Year: 2006
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895795991

Surviving Orchestral Music (Book)
Title: Surviving Orchestral Music
Author: Charles Hommann
Editor: Joanne Swenson-Eldridge
Abstract: Charles Hommann (1803–ca. 1872) was a Philadelphia-born musician and composer during the years in which instrumental music, especially European classical music, became increasingly prominent in the United States. He was encouraged by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, an organization founded in 1820, to aid its aging musician members and dedicated to “the cultivation of skill and diffusion of taste in music.” Hommann's surviving orchestral compositions—two overtures and a symphony—seem a fitting response to the musical environment created by the Society and its members. None of Hommann’s orchestral works was published. This edition of Hommann's three extant orchestral works, accompanied by an essay that discusses his cultural and historical milieu, will bring deserved attention to the enterprising Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia and make accessible for study and performance the earliest known products of an emerging tradition of notable orchestral works by native-born American composers.
Year: 2007
Publisher: A-R Editions
ISBN: 9780895796196

Four Saints in Three Acts (Book)
Title: Four Saints in Three Acts
Author: Gertrude Stein
Author: Virgil Thomson
Editor: Charles Fussell
Editor: H. Wiley Hitchcock
Abstract: With music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts was completed in 1928 but waited almost six years for its first performances. After a week’s run in Hartford, Connecticut, in February 1934, it moved to New York where--with some sixty performances in six weeks--it became the longest-running opera that Broadway up to that time had experienced. This critical edition by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell features the scenario by Maurice Grosser and is based on the full score that Thomson commissioned from copyist Ben Weber for his 1947-48 revision; it includes the 32-measure orchestral prelude to the Act II "Dance of the Angels," and it makes comparisons primarily to the manuscript scores held at the Library of Congress and Yale University. The critical apparatus applies as much to the music as to the Stein text, the principal source for which is the 1929 first publication.
Year: 2008
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796295

Symphonies nos. 1 and 3 (Book)
Title: Symphonies nos. 1 and 3
Author: Florence Price
Editor: Wayne Shirley
Editor: Rae Linda Brown
Abstract: Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953), who settled in Chicago in 1927, was the most widely known African-American woman composer from the 1930s until her death. This edition presents two important unpublished orchestral works: the Symphony no. 1 in E Minor (1932) and the Symphony no. 3 in C Minor (1940). The style of these works is quite different. Price's Symphony in E Minor is squarely in the nationalist tradition, and it may be more fully considered in the context of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Cultural characteristics are borne out in the pentatonic themes, call-and-response procedures, syncopated rhythms of the third movement's Juba dance, the preponderance of altered tones, and the timbral differentiation of instrumental choirs (the juxtaposition of the brass and woodwind choirs, for example). The Symphony in C Minor was inspired by new philosophical, political, and social currents, stemming from the Chicago Renaissance, underway from 1935-1950. The Great Migration (of blacks from the south to Chicago), the Depression, and the adjustment to urban life provided vivid life experiences as subject matter for Chicago Renaissance writers and artists (including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Margaret Bonds). Price's third symphony, which omits overtly black themes and simple dance rhythms, presents a modern approach to composition–a synthesis, rather than a retrospective view, of African-American life and culture.
Year: 2008
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796387

Songs from "A New Circle of Voices": The Sixteenth Annual Pow-wow at UCLA (Book)
Title: Songs from "A New Circle of Voices": The Sixteenth Annual Pow-wow at UCLA
Editor: Tara Browner
Abstract: Along with an introductory essay and explanatory notes, this volume contains transcriptions by ethnomusicologist Tara Browner of thirteen songs performed in May 2001 by the Cedartree Singers (from Falls Church, Va.) and Native Thunder (from Thunder Valley, S. Dak.) at the sixteenth annual pow-wow sponsored by UCLA’s American Indian Student Association. The transcriptions are complete in that they feature not only vocal lines for lead singers and ensembles, but also lines for drums and--with notation invented especially for this edition--movement patterns for both male and female dancers; the vocal material (including vocables and texts in the Lakota and Pawnee languages) are presented in full, with translations offered in the explanatory notes for each song.
Year: 2009
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796578

Six Marches (Book)
Title: Six Marches
Author: John Philip Sousa
Editor: Patrick Warfield
Abstract: The marches of John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) remain staples of the band repertoire, but our knowledge of Sousa’s music rests largely on modern editions designed for school (rather than professional) bands, or on reprintings of the original editions, which because of their small size and rushed publication contain countless inconsistencies and omissions. This volume contains full band scores for six Sousa marches, each prepared from the first printing of the band parts and informed by Sousa’s holograph and the original performance materials. The six marches—The Washington Post (1889), The Liberty Bell (1893), El Capitan (1896), The Stars and Stripes Forever (1896), Sabre and Spurs (1918), and George Washington Bicentennial (1930)—span Sousa’s career, from his tenure as leader of the United States Marine Band (1880-92) to his years conducting his own, commercial ensemble (1892-1932). Also included in the volume is an essay reexamining Sousa’s biography, source materials, performance practice, and place in American culture.
Year: 2010
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796752

The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook (Book)
Title: The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook
Editor: Dale Cockrell
Abstract: The eight Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), anchored in her family’s history and filled with memories of frontier life, are cornerstone classics in American children’s literature. Embedded in them are citations to 127 pieces of music--from parlor songs, stage songs, minstrel show songs, patriotic songs, Scottish and Irish songs, hymns and spirituals, to fiddle tunes, singing school songs, play party songs, folk songs, broadside ballads, catches and rounds. No books in American literature of comparable standing and popularity feature America’s vernacular music so centrally, assign it such a major narrative role, and index it in such rich abundance. This edition is a reconstruction of "the family songbook," based on the music referenced in Wilder’s books. Although no such object ever existed, her representations of music-making have likely informed the imaginations of more Americans than many a paper-and-bindings anthology, for what millions of readers have come to know about America’s musical heritage is what they learned from the Little House books—the titles and lyrics to songs; how songs and tunes functioned; where they were heard; what they meant; the importance of music to individuals, families, and communities. Wilder’s references and her evocative images of music-making thus form the basis of understanding about "American music" to many readers. The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook is an effort to give fresh voice and sound to the music inscribed in these great books and new appreciation about how music functioned during a place and time important in American history and mythology.
Year: 2011
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796875

Symphony no. 2 in D Minor, op. 24 (Jullien) (Book)
Title: Symphony no. 2 in D Minor, op. 24 (Jullien)
Author: George Frederick Bristow
Editor: Katherine K. Preston
Abstract: George Frederick Bristow (1825–98), American composer, conductor, teacher, and performer, was a pillar of the New York musical community for the second half of the nineteenth century. His participation in an important mid-century battle-of-words (between William Henry Fry and the journalist Richard Storrs Willis and concerning a lack of support for American composers by the Philharmonic Society) has unfortunately overshadowed his accomplishments as a composer, which were significant. Bristow is remembered today primarily for his opera Rip van Winkle (1855) and oratorio Daniel (1866), but he was also a skillful and productive composer of orchestral music—one of only a handful of American orchestral composers active at mid-century. Bristow wrote his Symphony no. 2 (Jullien) in 1853. It is a substantial work in four movements, scored for the standard orchestra of the early nineteenth century, and strongly influenced by the personal styles of Beethoven and Mendelssohn (whose works were performed regularly by the Philharmonic Society). The symphony is skillfully crafted, melodious, and an intrinsically worthy work of musical artistry. It was named to honor the French conductor Louis Jullien, who visited the United States in 1853–54 with an unparalleled orchestra. While in the United States Jullien both commissioned and performed American works (including this symphony); his support served as the catalyst for the Fry/Willis battle. The introductory essay to this symphony examines Bristow’s career, the composition of orchestral music in America at mid-century, and Jullien’s role in the musical battle; the edition makes available for the first time an important work that has been undeservedly forgotten for over 150 years.
Year: 2011
Publisher: A-R Editions
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780895796844

The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Book)
Title: The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle
Author: Georgia J. Cowart
Abstract: Prominent components of Louis XIV’s propaganda, the arts of spectacle also became sources of a potent resistance to the monarchy in late seventeenth-century France. With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority. With bold revisionist strokes, Cowart traces this strain of artistic dissent through the comedy-ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Molière, the late operatic works of Lully and the operas of his sons, the opera-ballets of André Campra and his contemporaries, and the related imagery of Antoine Watteau’s well-known painting The Pilgrimage to Cythera. She contends that through a variety of means, including the parody of old-fashioned court entertainments, these works reclaimed traditional allegories for new ideological aims, setting the tone for the Enlightenment. Looking at all these festive arts from the perspective of spectacle as it emerged from the court into the Parisian public sphere, Cowart ultimately situates the ballet and related genres as the missing link between an imagery of propaganda and an imagery of political protest.
Year: 2009
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780226116389

Vanishing Sensibilities Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann (Book)
Title: Vanishing Sensibilities Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann
Author: Kristina Muxfeldt
Abstract: Vanishing Sensibilities examines once passionate cultural concerns that shaped music of Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, and works of their contemporaries in drama or poetry. Music, especially music with text, was a powerful force in lively ongoing conversations about the nature of liberty, which included such topics as the role of consent in marriage, same-sex relationships, freedom of the press, and the freedom to worship (or not). Among the most common vehicles for stimulating debate about pressing social concerns were the genres of historical drama, and legend or myth, whose stories became inflected in fascinating ways during the Age of Metternich. Interior and imagined worlds, memories and fantasies, were called up in purely instrumental music, and music was privately celebrated for its ability to circumvent the restrictions that were choking the verbal arts.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780199782420

Special Sound The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Book)
Title: Special Sound The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Author: Louis Niebur
Abstract: Special Sound traces the fascinating creation and legacy of the BBC's electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in the context of other studios in Europe and America. The BBC built a studio to provide its own avant-garde dramatic productions with experimental sounds "neither music nor sound effect." Quickly, however, a popular kind of electronic music emerged in the form of quirky jingles, signature tunes such as Doctor Who, and incidental music for hundreds of programs. These influential sounds and styles, heard by millions of listeners over decades of operation on television and radio, have served as a primary inspiration for the use of electronic instruments in popular music. Using in-depth research in the studio's archives and papers, this book tells the history of the many engineers, composers, directors, and producers behind the studio to trace the shifting perception towards electronic music in Britain. Combining historical discussion of the people and instruments in the workshop with analysis of specific works, Louis Niebur creates a new model for understanding how the Radiophonic Workshop fits into the larger history of electronic music.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195368406

Songs in Motion Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied (Book)
Title: Songs in Motion Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied
Author: Yonatan Malin
Abstract: Qualities of motion and emotion in song come from poetic images, melody, harmony, and voice leading, but they also come from rhythm and meter-the flow and articulation of words and music in time. This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth-century German Lied, including songs for voice and piano by Fanny Hensel nee Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly determined periodicities of musical meter. A new method of declamatory-schema analysis is presented to illustrate common possibilities for setting trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. Degrees of rhythmic regularity and irregularity are also considered.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195340051

Listening through the Noise The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Book)
Title: Listening through the Noise The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music
Author: Joanna Demers
Abstract: Electronic music since 1980 has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic, popular, and avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture? This book explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195387650

Songs, Scribes, and Society The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (Book)
Title: Songs, Scribes, and Society The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers
Author: Jane Alden
Abstract: A new kind of songbook emerged in the later fifteenth century: personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated. Five closely related chansonniers, copied in the Loire Valley region of central France c. 1465-c. 1475, are the earliest surviving examples of this new genre. The Loire Valley Chansonniers preserve the music of such renowned composers as Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Antoine Busnoys. But their importance as musical sources has overshadowed the significance of these manuscripts as artifacts in their own right. This book places the physical objects at center, investigating the means by which they were produced and the broader culture in which they circulated. Jane Alden performs a codicological autopsy upon the manuscripts and reveals the hitherto unrecognized role of scribes in shaping the transmission and reception of the chanson repertory. Alden also challenges the long-held belief that the Loire Valley Chansonniers were intended for royal or noble patrons. Instead, she argues that a rising class of bureaucrats--notaries, secretaries, and other court officials--commissioned these exquisite objects. Active as writers and participants in poetry competitions, these individuals may even have written some of the chansons' texts.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195381528

Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Book)
Title: Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds
Author: Vanessa Agnew
Abstract: The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time.
Year: 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195336665

Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Book)
Title: Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz
Author: Todd Decker
Abstract: Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made a significant contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of Astaire’s work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and analyzes Astaire’s creative relationships with the greats, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire’s collaborations with African American musicians and his work with lesser known professionals—arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and performers.
Year: 2011
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780520268883

A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Book)
Title: A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League
Author: Lily E. Hirsch
Abstract: The Jewish Culture League was created in Berlin in June 1933, the only organization in Nazi Germany in which Jews were not only allowed but encouraged to participate in music, both as performers and as audience members. Lily E. Hirsch's A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is the first book to seriously investigate and parse the complicated questions the existence of this unique organization raised, such as why the Nazis would promote Jewish music when, in the rest of Germany, it was banned. The government's insistence that the League perform only Jewish music also presented the organization's leaders and membership with perplexing conundrums: what exactly is Jewish music? Who qualifies as a Jewish composer? And, if it is true that the Nazis conceived of the League as a propaganda tool, did Jewish participation in its activities amount to collaboration?
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780472034970

Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Book)
Title: Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy
Author: Ellen Rosand
Abstract: Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.
Year: 2007
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780520249349

The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (Book)
Title: The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
Author: David Schulenberg
Abstract: $85.00 Availability: Available Quantity: More Sharing ServicesShare Share on email Email a friend or librarian Add to Wish List [Printer Friendly Page] The first-born of the four composer sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann was often considered the most brilliant. Yet he left relatively few works and died in obscurity. This monograph, the first on the composer in nearly a century, identifies the unique features of Friedemann's music that make it worth studying and performing. It considers how Friedemann's training and upbringing differed from those of his brothers, leading to a style that diverged from that of his contemporaries. Central to the book are detailed discussions of all Friedemann's extant works: the virtuoso sonatas and concertos for keyboard instruments, the extraordinary chamber compositions (especially for flute), and the hitherto-neglected vocal music, including sacred cantatas and a remarkable work in honor of King Frederick the Great of Prussia. Special sections consider performance questions unique to Friedemann's music and provide a handy list of his works and their sources. Numerous musical examples provide glimpses of many little-known compositions, including a concerto ignored by previous students of Friedemann's music, here restored to his list of works.
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781580463591

Opera's Orbit: Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome (Book)
Title: Opera's Orbit: Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome
Author: Stefanie Tcharos
Abstract: Exploring the dynamic yet problematic context of musical drama in Rome, this study probes opera's relationship to modernity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Opera instigated a range of discourses, most notably among Rome's Academy of Arcadians, whose apprehension towards opera refracted larger aesthetic and cultural debates, and socio-political tensions. Tcharos presents a unique perspective, engaging opera as a historical force that established a sphere of influence across several genres and matrices of culture. The juxtaposition of opera against the prominent forms of the oratorio, serenata and cantata illustrates opera's constitutive role in a trans-genre cultural matrix, where the dialogical connections between musico-dramatic forms vividly capture the historicism, nostalgia, contradiction and cultural reform that opera inspired. By illuminating other genres as reactionary sites of music and drama, Opera's Orbit boldly reconstructs opera's eighteenth-century critical turn.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780521116657

Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III (Book)
Title: Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III
Author: Andrew H. Weaver
Abstract: Ferdinand III played a crucial role both in helping to end the Thirty Years' War and in re-establishing Habsburg sovereignty within his hereditary lands, and yet he remains one of the most neglected of all Habsburg emperors. The underlying premise of Sacred Music as Public Image for Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III is that Ferdinand's accomplishments came not through diplomacy or strong leadership but primarily through a skillful manipulation of the arts, through which he communicated important messages to his subjects and secured their allegiance to the Catholic Church. An important locus for cultural activity at court, especially as related to the Habsburgs' political power, was the Emperor's public image. Ferdinand III offers a fascinating case study in monarchical representation, for the war necessitated that he revise the image he had cultivated at the beginning of his reign, that of a powerful, victorious warrior. Weaver argues that by focusing on the patronage of sacred music (rather than the more traditional visual and theatrical means of representation), Ferdinand III was able to uphold his reputation as a pious Catholic reformer and subtly revise his triumphant martial image without sacrificing his power, while also achieving his Counter-Reformation goal of unifying his hereditary lands under the Catholic church. Drawing upon recent methodological approaches to the representation of other early modern monarchs, as well as upon the theory of confessionalization, this book places the sacred vocal music composed by imperial musicians into the rich cultural, political, and religious contexts of mid-seventeenth-century Central Europe. The book incorporates dramatic productions such as opera, oratorio, and Jesuit drama.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Ashgate
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781409421191

Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Book)
Title: Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum
Author: Daniel Cavicchi
Abstract: Listening and Longing explores the emergence of music listening in the United States, from its early stages in the antebellum era, when entrepreneurs first packaged and sold the experience of hearing musical performance, to the Gilded Age, when genteel critics began to successfully redefine the cultural value of listening to music. In a series of interconnected stories, American studies scholar Daniel Cavicchi focuses on the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization in shaping practices of music audiences in America. Grounding our contemporary culture of listening in its seminal historical moment—before the iPod, stereo system, or phonograph—Cavicchi offers a fresh understanding of the role of listening in the history of music.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780819571618

Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Book)
Title: Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani
Author: Roger Freitas
Abstract: This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or even rejecting his art, his life illustrates how music-making was always also a negotiation for power. Providing a rare glimpse of the social and political contexts of seventeenth-century music, Roger Freitas sheds light on the mechanisms that generated meaning for music, clarifying what music at this time actually was.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780521885218

Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Book)
Title: Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America
Author: Nancy Newman
Abstract: In Good Music for a Free People, author Nancy Newman examines the activities and reception of the Germania Musical Society, an orchestra whose members emigrated from Berlin during the Revolutions of 1848. These two dozen "Forty-Eighters" gave nearly a thousand concerts in North America during the ensuing six-year period, possibly reaching a million listeners. Drawing on a memoir by member Henry Albrecht, Newman provides insights into the musicians' desire to bring their music to the audiences of a democratic republic at this turbulent time. Eager to avoid the egotism and self-promotion of the European patronage system, they pledged to work for their mutual interests both musically and socially. "One for all, and all for one" became their motto. Originally published in German, Albrecht's memoir is presented here in for the first time in translation.
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781580463454

Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics and Survival (Book)
Title: Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics and Survival
Author: Ann Morrison Spinney
Abstract: Based on extensive research across several disciplines, this book examines the songs and dances involved in public ceremonies of the Wabanaki Confederacy, a coalition of five Algonquian First Nations that figured importantly in the political history of New England and the Maritimes from the seventeenth century on. Ethnomusicologist Ann Morrison Spinney analyzes these ceremonial performances as they have been maintained in one of those nations, the Passamaquoddy community of Maine. She compares historical accounts with forms that have persisted to the present, showing how versions of the same songs, dances, and ritual speeches have continued to play a vital role in Passamaquoddy culture over time. A particular focus of the study is the annual Sipayik Indian Day, a public presentation of the dances associated with the protocols of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Spinney interprets these practices using melodic analysis and cultural contextual frameworks, drawing on a variety of sources, including written documents, sound and video recordings, interviews with singers, dancers, and other cultural practitioners, and her own fieldwork observations. Her research shows that Passamaquoddy techniques of song composition and performance parallel both the structure of the Passamaquoddy language and the political organizations that these ceremonies support.
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781558497184

The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence (Book)
Title: The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence
Author: Timothy J. McGee
Abstract: The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence follows the development of Florentine musical ensembles, describing their duties and repertories, placing them in their political and social context, and tracing their changes through the years of the Florentine Republic. From the 13th through the 16th centuries, the city of Florence was the most powerful in Europe. It was a center of finance and trade, as well as art and music. The Republic employed musicians to perform for the enormous number of ceremonial events each year. These musicians were the most visible (and audible) symbols of Florence, playing a major role in displaying the majestic image of the city. Their story, repertory, high-profile involvement in the daily life of the city, and close involvement with the Medici add a new dimension to the history of late-medieval Florence.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780253353047

The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Book)
Title: The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London
Author: Christina Bashford
Abstract: $90.00 Availability: Available Quantity: More Sharing ServicesShare Share on email Email a friend or librarian Add to Wish List [Printer Friendly Page] This monograph investigates the promotion and consumption of high musical culture among leisured society in Victorian London, by focusing on the activities of the concert manager John Ella and his Musical Union [1845-81], an eminent, long-lived institution for chamber music, much fêted across Europe in its day. It combines a biography of Ella with a social-economic history of the Musical Union, its players, repertoire and audiences, and sets them against the gradually shifting contexts for London concerts, chamber music and cultural life. Ella's extraordinary life story, which began in provincial, artisan-class obscurity and ended in the upper echelons of London society, shapes the narrative. Such themes as entrepreneurship, concert management, taste shaping, music appreciation and elite social networks are discussed throughout, as is the curious interplay between the desire to 'sacralize' chamber music, especially Beethoven's, on the one hand, and the need to survive amid the increasing commercial imperatives of London concert life on the other. CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Year: 2007
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781843832980

Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites (Book)
Title: Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites
Author: David W. Beach
Abstract: Musicians -- listeners, performers, and scholars alike--have often felt a profound connectedness between various movements in multimovement works by the great composers. But sensing musical unity is one thing; showing it is another. In Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites, David Beach examines many of the forty-four works by Bach in this genre-for keyboard, orchestra, and solo instruments, including the beloved solo works for violin and for cello-from this perspective. Through careful attention to motivic and harmonic repetitions at various structural levels, made plain to the eye in numerous annotated musical examples and diagrams, Beach establishes that Bach often did link several movements of a suite in various ways, sometimes by overt but often by more subtle means. Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites thus provides new insight into the inner workings of these great works.
Year: 2005
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
ISBN: 9781580462020

Chopin's Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom (Book)
Title: Chopin's Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom
Author: Jonathan D. Bellman
Abstract: Chopin's Second Ballade, Op. 38 is frequently performed, and takes only seven or so minutes to play. Yet the work remains very poorly understood--disagreement prevails on issues from its tonic and two-key structure to its posited relationship with the poems of Adam Mickiewicz. Chopin's Polish Ballade is a reexamination and close analysis of this famous work, revealing the Ballade as a piece with a powerful political story to tell. Through the general musical styles and specific references in the Ballade, which use both operatic strategies and approaches developed in programmatic piano pieces for amateurs, author Jonathan Bellman traces a clear narrative thread to contemporary French operas. His careful historical exegesis of previously ignored musical and cultural contexts brings to light a host of new insights about this remarkable piece, which, as Bellman shows, reflects the cultural preoccupations of the Polish emigres in mid-1830s Paris, pining with bitter nostalgia for a homeland now under Russian domination. This vital connection to the extramusical culture of its day forms the basis for a plausible relationship with the nationalistic poetry of Mickiewicz. Chopin's Polish Ballade also solves the long-standing conundrum of the two extant versions of the Ballade, making an important point about the flexible notion of "work" that Chopin embraced.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195338867

Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Book)
Title: Medieval Music and the Art of Memory
Author: Anna Maria Busse Berger
Abstract: This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.
Year: 2005
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780520240285

Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (Book)
Title: Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125
Author: Susan Boynton
Abstract: During the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the imperial abbey of Farfa was one of the most powerful institutions on the Italian peninsula. In this period many of the lands of central Italy fell under its sway, and it enjoyed the protection of the emperor until the 1120s, when it passed gradually into the control of the papacy. At the same time, the monastery was an influential religious center, and the monks of Farfa filled their days with the celebration of the liturgy through prayers, processions, sermons, chants, and hymns. Susan Boynton, a historian of medieval music, addresses several of the major themes of present-day medieval historiography through a close study of the liturgical practices of the abbey of Farfa. Boynton's findings are a striking demonstration of the local nature of liturgical practices in the centuries before church ritual was controlled and codified by the papacy. Boynton shows that the liturgy was highly flexible, continually adapting to the monastery's changing circumstances. The monks regularly modified traditional forms to reflect new realities, often in the service of Farfa's power and prestige. Equally fascinating is Boynton's examination of the process by which Farfa, like other monasteries, cathedral chapters, and royal houses, constantly rewrote its history—particularly the stories of its founding—as part of the continuous negotiation of power that was central to medieval politics and culture.
Year: 2006
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780801443817

Playing Across a Divide Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters (Book)
Title: Playing Across a Divide Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters
Author: Benjamin Brinner
Abstract: In the last decade of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, Israelis and Palestinians saw the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the escalation of suicide bombings and retaliations in the region. During this tumultuous time, numerous collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian musicians coalesced into a significant musical scene informed by these extremes of hope and despair on both national and personal levels. Following the bands Bustan Abraham and Alei Hazayit from their creation and throughout their careers, as well as the collaborative projects of Israeli artist Yair Dalal, Playing Across a Divide demonstrates the possibility of musical alternatives to violent conflict and hatred in an intensely contested, multicultural environment. These artists' music drew from Western, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Afro-diasporic musical practices, bridging differences and finding innovative solutions to the problems inherent in combining disparate musical styles and sources. Creating this new music brought to the forefront the musicians' contrasting assumptions about sound production, melody, rhythm, hybridity, ensemble interaction, and improvisation. Author Benjamin Brinner traces the tightly interconnected field of musicians and the people and institutions that supported them as they and their music circulated within the region and along international circuits. Brinner argues that the linking of Jewish and Arab musicians' networks, the creation of new musical means of expression, and the repeated enactment of culturally productive musical alliances provide a unique model for mutually respectful and beneficial coexistence in a chronically disputed land.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195395945

The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (Book)
Title: The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo
Author: Lorenzo Candelaria
Abstract: The Rosary Cantoral is a rare and beautifully decorated manuscript of Latin plainchant for the Catholic Mass compiled in Toledo, Spain, around the year 1500. In an engaging and richly interdisciplinary essay, Lorenzo Candelaria approaches the Rosary Cantoral as a cultural artifact, unlocking the secrets behind its images and music to reveal the social history and rituals of an elite brotherhood dedicated to the rosary and aspects of the religious community it served: the Dominicans of San Pedro Mártir de Toledo. The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo presents a model for realizing the fuller significance of illuminated music manuscripts as cultural artifacts and offers unprecedented insights into the social and devotional life of Toledo, Spain, around the turn of the sixteenth century. After solving the mystery of the Rosary Cantoral's origins, subsequent essays probe the meaning and cultural significance of the manuscript's iconography (including a border decoration after Albrecht Dürer), its rare Spanish chants for the Mass, and two striking musical works for multiple voices (one by Josquin Desprez and another on "L'homme armé"). Ultimately, this book focuses on the extraordinary circumstances that engendered the compilation of the Rosary Cantoral around 1500: a system of patronage between a brotherhood of suspected heretics and a religious house that was a key supporter of the Inquisition in Toledo.
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781580463546

Terry Riley's In C (Book)
Title: Terry Riley's In C
Author: Robert Carl
Abstract: Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical composition, Terry Riley's In C (1964) challenges the standards of imagination, intellect, and musical ingenuity to which "classical" music is held. Only one page of score in length, it contains neither specified instrumentation nor parts. Its fifty-three motives are compact, presented without any counterpoint or evident form. The composer gave only spare instructions and no tempo. And he assigned the work a title that's laconic in the extreme. At the same moment of its composition, Elliott Carter was working on his Concerto for Piano, a work Stravinsky was to hail as a masterpiece. Having almost completed Laborinthus II, Luciano Berio would soon start the Sinfonia. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just finished Momente. In context of these other works, and of the myriad of compositional styles and trends which preceded them, In C stands the whole idea of musical "progress" on its head.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195325287

Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage (Book)
Title: Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage
Author: Caryl Clark
Abstract: This fascinating study of ethnic theatrical representation provides original perspectives on the cultural milieu, compositional strategies, and operatic legacy of Joseph Haydn. The portrayal of Jews changed markedly during the composer's lifetime. Before the Enlightenment, when Jews were treated as a people apart, physical infirmities and other markers of 'difference' were frequently caricatured on the comedic stage. However, when society began to debate the 'Jewish Question' - understood in the later eighteenth century as how best to integrate Jews into society as productive citizens - theatrical representations became more sympathetic. As Caryl Clark describes, Haydn had many opportunities to observe Jews in his working environments in Vienna and Eisenstadt, and incorporated Jewish stereotypes in two early works. An understanding of Haydn's evolving approach to ethnic representation on the stage provides deeper insight into the composer's iconic wit and humanity, and to the development of opera as a cultural art form across the centuries.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780521455473

Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature (Book)
Title: Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature
Author: Richard Cohn
Abstract: Music theorists have long believed that 19th-century triadic progressions idiomatically extend the diatonic syntax of 18th-century classical tonality, and have accordingly unified the two repertories under a single mode of representation. Post-structuralist musicologists have challenged this belief, advancing the view that many romantic triadic progressions exceed the reach of classical syntax and are mobilized as the result of a transgressive, anti-syntactic impulse. In Audacious Euphony, author Richard Cohn takes both of these views to task, arguing that romantic harmony operates under syntactic principles distinct from those that underlie classical tonality, but no less susceptible to systematic definition. Charting this alternative triadic syntax, Cohn reconceives what consonant triads are, and how they relate to one another. In doing so, he shows that major and minor triads have two distinct natures: one based on their acoustic properties, and the other on their ability to voice-lead smoothly to each other in the chromatic universe. Whereas their acoustic nature underlies the diatonic tonality of the classical tradition, their voice-leading properties are optimized by the pan-triadic progressions characteristic of the 19th century. Audacious Euphony develops a set of inter-related maps that organize intuitions about triadic proximity as seen through the lens of voice-leading proximity, using various geometries related to the 19th-century Tonnetz. This model leads to cogent analyses both of particular compositions and of historical trends across the long nineteenth century. Essential reading for music theorists, Audacious Euphony is also a valuable resource for music historians, performers and composers.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780199772698

The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Book)
Title: The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna
Author: Nicholas Cook
Abstract: Today we think of Heinrich Schenker, who lived in Vienna from 1884 until his death in 1935, as the most influential music theorist of the twentieth century. But he saw his theoretical writings as part of a comprehensive project for the reform of musical composition, performance, criticism, and education-and beyond that, as addressing fundamental cultural, social, and political problems of the deeply troubled age in which he lived. This book aims to explain Schenker's project through reading his key works within a series of period contexts. These include music criticism, the field in which Schenker first made his name; Viennese modernism, particularly the debate over architectural ornamentation; German cultural conservatism, which is the source of many of Schenker's most deeply entrenched values; and Schenker's own position as a Galician Jew who came to Vienna just as fully racialized anti-semitism was developing there. As well as presenting an unfamiliar perspective on the cultural and political ferment of fin-de-siecle Vienna, this book reveals how deeply Schenker's theory is permeated by the social and political. It also raises issues concerning the meaning and value of music theory, and the extent to which today's music-theoretical agenda unwittingly reflects the values and concerns of a very different world.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780199744299

Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy (Book)
Title: Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy
Author: Jeremy Day-O'Connell
Abstract: Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy offers the first comprehensive account of a widely recognized aspect of music history: the increasing use of pentatonic ("black-key scale") techniques in nineteenth-century Western art-music. Pentatonicism in nineteenth-century music encompasses hundreds of instances, many of which predate by decades the more famous examples of Debussy and Dvorák. This book weaves together historical commentary with music theory and analysis in order to explain the sources and significance of an important, but hitherto only casually understood, phenomenon. The book introduces several distinct categories of pentatonic practice -- pastoral, primitive, exotic, religious, and coloristic -- and examines pentatonicism in relationship to changes in the melodic and harmonic sensibility of the time. The text concludes with an additional appendix of over 400 examples, an unprecedented resource demonstrating the individual artistry with which virtually every major nineteenth-century composer (from Schubert, Chopin, and Berlioz to Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler) handled the seemingly "simple" materials of pentatonicism.
Year: 2007
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781580462488

Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Book)
Title: Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism
Author: Mary E. Davis
Abstract: Music and fashion: the deep connection between these two expressive worlds is firmly entrenched. Yet little attention has been paid to the association of sound and style in the early twentieth century—a period of remarkable and often parallel developments in both high fashion and the arts, including music. This beautifully written book, lavishly illustrated with fashion plates and photographs, explores the relationship between music and fashion, elegantly charting the importance of these arts to the rise of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on the emergence of the movement known as Neoclassicism, Mary E. Davis demonstrates that new aesthetic approaches were related to fashion in a manner that was perfectly attuned to the tastes of jazz-age sophisticates. Looking in particular at three couturiers—Paul Poiret, Germaine Bongard, and Coco Chanel—and three breakthrough fashion magazines—La Gazette du Bon Ton, Vanity Fair, and Vogue—Davis illuminates for the first time the ways in which fashion's imperatives of originality and constant change influenced composers such as Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Les Six. She also considers the role played by the Ballets Russes, and explores the contributions of artists including costume and set designer Léon Bakst, writer and director Jean Cocteau, Amédée Ozenfant, and Pablo Picasso. The first study to situate music in this rich context, Classic Chic demonstrates the profound importance of the linked endeavors of composition and couture to modernist thought. In addition to its innovative approach to this important moment in history, Davis's focus on the social aspects of the story makes the book a tremendously engaging read.
Year: 2008
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780520256217

Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (Book)
Title: Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together
Author: Kay Dickinson
Abstract: In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, Off Key also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged "failures" have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself. A provocative and politically-conscious look at music-image relations, Off Key will appeal to students and scholars of film music, cinema studies, media studies, cultural studies, and labor history.
Year: 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780195326635

Music and the Performance of Identity on Marie-Galante, French Antilles (Book)
Title: Music and the Performance of Identity on Marie-Galante, French Antilles
Author: Ron Emoff
Abstract: Marie-Galante is a small island situated in the Caribbean to the south of Guadeloupe. The majority of Marie-Galantais are descendants of the slave era, though a few French settlers also occupy the island. Along with its neighbours Guadeloupe and Martinique, Marie-Galante forms an official département of France. Marie-Galante historically has never been an independent polity. Marie-Galantais express sentiments of being 'deux fois colonisé', or twice colonized, concomitant with their sense of insularity from a global organization of place. Dr Ron Emoff translates this pervasive sense of displacement into the concept of the 'non-nation'. Musical practices on the island provide Marie-Galantais with a means of re-connecting with other significant distant places. Many Marie-Galantais display a 'split-subjectivity', embracing an African heritage, a French association and a Caribbean regionalism. This book is unique, in part, with r