Music Performance Commons^™

Contributors To Issue 7

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Voyage D’Hiver: Franz Schubert/Wilhelm Müller, Winterreise, Op. 89, D. 911. B Records Lbm057, 2024 [Review]., Jennifer Ronyak

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Helen Beach Jones, The Eurydice Club, And Women Musicians In Early Toledo, Ohio, Mary Natvig

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Toledo, Ohio native Helen Beach Jones (1857–1940) was a professionally trained church organist, choral conductor, and music teacher who paved the way for northwest Ohio’s art-music community today. Her story sheds light on the vibrant community of women musicians living in Toledo, Ohio, at the turn of the twentieth century, and as the founder and director of the Eurydice Club, a women’s chorus that was one of the city’s earliest and most prestigious music ensembles, she provided a home for women musicians throughout the region that lasted far longer than her tenure as conductor. In addition to her choral work, …

2025-2026 Tanglewood At Boca West: Jon's Favorites, Lynn University Philharmonia, Jon H. Robertson

Philharmonia

No abstract provided.

An Analysis And Performer's Guide Of Boulder Canyon, Hoover Dam By Clark Hubbard, Tyler Hawk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Clark Hubbard is currently the Assistant Director of the Vanderbilt Marching and Athletic Bands. He is active as an American percussionist, composer, artist, and educator. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States and overseas, including solo, chamber, percussion, and electronic compositions. This document aims to analyze Boulder Canyon, Hoover Dam, discussing how the fixed media influences musical decisions. This document is also a performer’s guide for the piece.

Percussion with fixed media has been composed for since the early to middle 1900s. Inspiration from the techniques and early pieces of fixed media composition can be found in …

Taruskin’S Great Contributions And A Few Shortcomings, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Among the most needed, and durable, features of Richard Taruskin’s life’s work was his consistent interpretation of music and music-making within and against their societal and cultural contexts. This stood in contrast to the positivistic methodologies that German, British, and American musicology valued in the 1960s–70s: instances of the latter include the making of reliable critical editions and, in a very different sense, various “the notes only” methods of music analysis.

The breadth of Taruskin’s vision and his command of musical and cultural history are apparent in the enormous “Nationalism” entry in the 2001 edition of Grove (now available at …

Taruskin’S Dichotomies: Beyond Text And Act, Alon Schab

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s brilliant rhetoric sometimes led him to overly categorical generalizations. One notable example is his four-stage “genealogy of musical morals,” summarizing the history of music’s objectification as “art” through literacy, printing, the birth of transcendent and autonomous art, and recording. Similarly, Taruskin’s subtle bias against the British early music scene was often camouflaged under various generalized dichotomies such as “straight-style versus crooked-style.”

Taruskin’s views, initially seen in CD reviews and newspaper columns, gained enduring influence through their repackaging in Text and Act. This work also impacted John Butt’s Playing with History, where Taruskin played a key role in summarizing …

Richard Taruskin And The Early Music Movement, Uri Golomb

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s writings on the Early Music Movement had a pivotal influence on debates surrounding the concept of historical authenticity in musical performance. Taruskin championed the thesis that historically-informed performance (HIP) is only tenuously connected to actual past practices, that “a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around” (as Taruskin wrote in a 1988 essay, reprinted in his seminal collection Text and Act). In arguing his case, he correctly diagnosed the practices and motivations of a major group of performers within the Early …

Introduction, Ronit Seter, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin—the single most prominent and influential musicologist of the past half-century—died on July 1, 2022 at age 77. This Colloquy consists of extended versions of papers presented on July 2, 2023, at the annual meeting of the Israeli Musicological Society, and additional essays by scholars who knew Taruskin personally. The essays engage in critical reflections on his personality, ethics, teaching philosophy, methodologies, and massive and skillful literary output. Moreover, they illuminate developments in musicology over the past fifty years, from its positivistic roots and its focus on Western canonical works to challenges from ethnomusicological practices, feminist theory, and anti-racism/colonialism.

Front Matter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

Pedro António Avondano: Il Mondo Della Luna. Naxos 660487-88, 2021., Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The world-premiere recording of Il mondo della luna by Pedro António Avondano consists of a highly skillful and alert performance by Portuguese musicians, including singers well trained in Italian. The recitatives were rehearsed in an unusual way, with the singers first speaking the lines rather than singing them. The experiment will be judged variously by different observers. The reviewer dislikes the frequent clash in pitch between voice and instruments, especially at cadences. But others have hailed the recording unstintingly.

Expanding Access To Latin American Art Song: A Study Of Theodoro Valcárcel's Andean-Influenced Art Songs, Douglas E. Perez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

EXPANDING ACCESS TO LATIN AMERICAN ART SONG: A STUDY OF THEODORO VALCÁRCEL’S ANDEAN-INFLUENCED ART SONGS advocates for the exploration and performance of underrepresented Latin American composers. Multiple methods of increasing access are discussed, including the creation of a central source for IPA, literal, and poetic translations of Latin American art songs; the study of seldom-performed composers, their output, and influences; and the application of these elements through informed performance. This document centers on the Peruvian composer Theodoro Valcárcel and analyzes the intersection of his indigenous heritage with his Latin American and European musical training as reflected in his compositional style …

Christopher Luna-Mega: Time’S Arrow. Other Minds Om 1031-2, 2022 [Review], Rob Haskins

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Christopher Fox: Trostlieder. Kairos 0220005kai, 2022 [Review], Rob Haskins

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Sylvie Bodorová: Snow And Stars. Cesky Rozhlas Cr 1117-2, 2021 [Review]., Tom Moore

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Romances For Voice And Guitar, Arranged By Hector Berlioz. Atma Classique Acd2 2800, 2020 [Review], Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

‘Brillez, Astres Nouveaux!’ Arias And Other Excerpts From Eighteenth-Century French Operas By Rameau, Leclair, Boismortier, And Others. Aparte Cd Ap223, 2020 [Review], Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Defying The Conventional: Musical Performance, Embodied Cognition, And The Reconfiguration Of Institutional Discourse, Dillon Parmer

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This essay confronts the dialectic between theory and practice through a comparison of an idea basic to how we understand music (the notion that pitch moves up and down in vertical space) with how pitch is thought of in actual music-making. The comparison leads to both a new conceptual model for thinking about pitch, what might be called Pitch Horizontality, as well as a proposal for how to bring institutional discourse about music into sync, not with how scholars in other disciplines think about their subject matter, but with the thinking that goes on in contexts of real-world artistic production.