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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
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Robert Heller’S Magical Mystery Tours, Jessie Fillerup
Robert Heller’S Magical Mystery Tours, Jessie Fillerup
Music Faculty Publications
Robert Heller, a virtually unknown figure in music-historical accounts, trained in the 1840s at the Royal Academy of Music in London and gave the American premieres of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos with the Germania Musical Society. But he also pursued a parallel career in theatrical magic, using his musical virtuosity to elevate his social and artistic stature as a conjurer. Between 1852 and 1878, his magic act was seen by millions in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, including states and territories in the American West never visited by contemporary piano virtuosos like Thalberg and De Meyer. …
Composing After The Italian Manner: The English Cantata 1700-1710, Jennifer Cable
Composing After The Italian Manner: The English Cantata 1700-1710, Jennifer Cable
Music Faculty Publications
In this chapter, I will examine examples from several of the earliest eighteenth-century English cantatas written after the Italian style and in direct response to the growing popularity of Italian vocal music in England.3 The early English cantatas of three composers-John Eccles, Daniel Purcell, and Johann Christoph Pepusch-portend how each would fare in the new musical century, when the compositional ideals of an earlier era were foresaken as the focus on Italian vocal music, the 'talk of the town', broadened in scope and sharpened in intensity.
Louis Armstrong, Gene H. Anderson
Louis Armstrong, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
Despite his lifelong claim of 4 July 1900 as his birthday, Armstrong was actually born on 4 August 1901 as recorded on a baptismal certificate discovered after his death. Although calling himself “Louis Daniel Armstrong” in his 1954 autobiography, he denied knowledge of his middle name or its origin. Nevertheless, evidence of “Daniel” being a family name is strong: Armstrong's paternal great-great-grandfather, a third generation slave brought from Tidewater Virginia for sale in New Orleans in 1818, was named Daniel Walker, as was his son, Armstrong's great-grandfather. The latter's wife, Catherine Walker, sponsored her great-grandson's baptism at the family's home …
How A Thrown Shooe Became A Tragedy And Other Funny Stories: A Study Of The Three Burlesque Cantatas (1741) By Henry Carey (1689–1743), Jennifer Cable
How A Thrown Shooe Became A Tragedy And Other Funny Stories: A Study Of The Three Burlesque Cantatas (1741) By Henry Carey (1689–1743), Jennifer Cable
Music Faculty Publications
This is not to say that Carey thought ill of Italian music, per se. Contemporary accounts, including Carey’s own poems, reveal his high opinion of Handel and others who composed in the Italian style. Rather, Carey’s literary barbs were directed toward his English brothers and sisters who were all too swift to support Italian opera and Italian singers at the expense of English music and musicians. Carey spent much of his career addressing this cultural issue from a variety of creative vantage points: prose, song texts, original melodies, Italian-style cantatas, burlesques of Italian operatic style, and anonymous commentaries. This essay …
Leadership Through Laughter: How Henry Carey Reinvented English Music And Song, Jennifer Cable
Leadership Through Laughter: How Henry Carey Reinvented English Music And Song, Jennifer Cable
Music Faculty Publications
Polly refers to Miss Polly Peachum, a character in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728 (January). Henry Carey (1687-1743) set this verse (1728) to his famous tune Sally in our Alley, which Gay had used in the opera. Carey's verse about Polly Peachum became so popular that it was eventually incorporated into The Beggar's Opera libretto, beginning with the third edition.1 Even in this short example, we can detect Carey's delight that Polly had overtaken "the Opera of Rolli," alluding to Italian opera in general by referring specifically to the Italian poet and librettist who adapted libretti for …
The Composing Of "Musick" In The English Language: The Development Of The English Cantata, 1700-1750, Jennifer Cable
The Composing Of "Musick" In The English Language: The Development Of The English Cantata, 1700-1750, Jennifer Cable
Music Faculty Publications
The cantata as cultivated by Alessandro Scarlatti and his contemporaries Alessandro Stradella and Giovanni Bononcini was the model for the early development of the English cantata, "which remained a solo vocal genre in England throughout the eighteenth century, namely 1710-1800. By focusing on specific musical elements, such as cantata format (recitative-aria-recitative-aria or aria-recitative-aria), song forms, motivic use, textual content, instrumental requirements and performance venues, the evolution of the English cantata can be observed during the first half of the eighteenth century, developing from a simple imitation of the Italian form to a genre in its own right.1
Jazz On The River By William Howland Kenney (Book Review), Gene H. Anderson
Jazz On The River By William Howland Kenney (Book Review), Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
Jazz has not always been "America's classical music." In the first decades of the twentieth century it was regarded by much of the black and white Establishment as unsettling, provocative, even dangerous - attitudes exacerbated by the social upheaval of the Great Migration around the time of World War I. Enter black riverboat jazz bands to negotiate the color line: to help "white Americans approach in an oblique manner underlying social and cultural changes that were too deep and too heavily laden with pain, guilt, and fear for most citizens to discuss openly" (5). Such is the thesis of Jazz …
Convergence And Divergence In Peter Mennin's Canzona, Gene H. Anderson
Convergence And Divergence In Peter Mennin's Canzona, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
In a brief but perspicacious study of Mennin' s music in 1954, Walter Hendl describes the composer as "a consummate craftsman who devotes great attention to the organization of materials." Although Hendl may not have known Canzona, which had been premiered in 1951 but not published until the year of his essay, the author's statement could well have been written with Mennin's sole piece for band specifically in mind. Not only is every aspect of Canzona integrally related to every other, but the relationships are deployed with a remarkable economy of means.
The Origin Of Armstrong's Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Gene H. Anderson
The Origin Of Armstrong's Hot Fives And Hot Sevens, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
It has been almost fifty years since Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-1928 were first recognized in print as a watershed of jazz history and the means by which the trumpeter emerged as the style's first transcendent figure. Since then these views have only intensified. The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens have come to be regarded as harbingers of all jazz since, with Armstrong's status as the “single most creative and innovative force in jazz history” and an “American genius” now well beyond dispute. This study does not question these claims but seeks, rather, to determine …
Stride! Fats, Jimmy, Lion, Lamb, And All The Other Ticklers By John L. Fell And Terkild Vinding, Giant Strides: The Legacy Of Dick Wellstood By Edward Meyer (Book Reviews), Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
As their titles suggest, these books focus on stride pianists rather than on the style itself. Well researched and written by experienced jazz enthusiasts, the books approach their subject from opposite points of view. Stride! provides a brief survey of the idiom followed by biographical sketches of players identified or associated with stride; Giant Strides recounts the life of a player who concluded the stride legacy.
From Jazz To Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians And Their Music, 1890-1935 By Thomas Hennessey (Book Review), Gene H. Anderson
From Jazz To Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians And Their Music, 1890-1935 By Thomas Hennessey (Book Review), Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
According to Hennessey, the purpose of the present text, an extension of his dissertation, "From Jazz Age to Swing: Black Musicians and Their Music, 1917-1935" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), is to trace the interaction between the enormous sociological changes in America and the music of African American musicians from the origin of jazz to the beginning of the swing era. He claims that "the transformation of jazz from a primarily local music rooted in black folk traditions to the tightly managed product of a national industry controlled by white businessmen and aimed at a predominantly white mass market paralleled …
The Triumph Of Timelessness Over Time In Hindemith's "Turandot Scherzo" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson
The Triumph Of Timelessness Over Time In Hindemith's "Turandot Scherzo" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
Hindemith's title of his four-movement von Weber suite of 1943 poses a problem. The composer's characteristic reticence about his sources delayed their documentation for some twenty years, whereupon it was found that the Symphonic Metamorphosis was based, not only on themes, but on complete pieces. Rather than "thematic transformation," the "metamorphosis" of the title would thus be more accurately regarded as "recomposition," in which changes of tone system, timbre, harmony, rhythm, and form, in addition to the melody itself, transform every level and component of the original composition's structure. This study attempts to demonstrate how Hindemith achieves such a metamorphosis …
Blues For You Johnny: Johnny Dodds And His "Wild Man Blues" Recordings Of 1927 And 1938, Gene H. Anderson
Blues For You Johnny: Johnny Dodds And His "Wild Man Blues" Recordings Of 1927 And 1938, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
Shortly after Johnny Dodd's death Sidney Bechet invited Johnny's brother to join his New Orleans Feetwarmers in a recording honoring Bechet's hometown musical colleague and lifelong friend. Although Baby Dodds pronounced "Blues for You, Johnny," recorded in Chicago on September 6, 1940, a "fine tribute," Down Beat found vocalist Herb Jeffries "from hunger on blues." A more fitting memorial would have been "Wild Man Blues" cut by Bechet a few months previously. Said to be his favorite number, "Wild Man Blues" was recorded by Dodds three times in 1927 and once again in 1938. This study examines Johnny Dodds's style …
Musical Metamorphoses In Hindemith's "March" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson
Musical Metamorphoses In Hindemith's "March" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
From the composer we learn nothing about his approaches to the construction of this piece or about specific methods of musical metamorphosis. Hindemith, in fact, considered such knowledge useless, as he trenchantly observed in an early autobiographical note: " ... for people with ears my things are perfectly easy to understand, so an analysis is superfluous. For people without ears such cribs can't help." Indeed, one is struck, not by the differences, but by the similarities between the March and its prototype, von Weber's Marcia from Huit pièces for piano duet, Op. 60, No. 7, composed in 1819. But while …
The Genesis Of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Gene H. Anderson
The Genesis Of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Gene H. Anderson
Music Faculty Publications
Although far from overlooked by jazz writers, the origins of Oliver's Creole Band remain confused and obscure. This article attempts to clarify the Creole Band's lineage by collating and interpreting relevant material from oral histories, newspapers, census records, photographs, and other primary sources. To the extent that there may exist undiscovered and unexamined documents, these findings must remain incomplete and should be considered a report in progress.