Music Commons^™

Sounds Of Other Shores: The Musical Poetics Of Identity On Kenya's Swahili Coast, By Andrew J. Eisenberg. Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 2024 [Review]., Charles Lwanga

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Aesthetics Of Pop Music, By Diedrich Diederichsen. Hoboken: Polity Press, 2023 [Review]., Michael Mario Albrecht

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Musical History As Seen Through Contemporary Eyes: Essays In Honor Of H. Robert Cohen, Edited By Benjamin Knysak And Zdravko Blažeković. Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2021 [Review]., Diana R. Hallman

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Lied At The Crossroads Of Performance And Musicology, Edited By Benjamin Binder And Jennifer Ronyak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024 [Review]., James Parsons

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Berlioz And His World, Edited By Francesca Brittan And Sarah Hibberd. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2024 [Review]., Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

On Music Theory And Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone, By Philip Ewell. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2023 [Review]., George Adams

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Coda: On My Six Experiments In Conjoining (And Contrasting) Two Composers, James Porter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The author has previously published six essays, each based on a novel technique: pairing one piece each from two different composers, in an attempt at teasing out important implications of these (mostly little-known) works. These implications would have been harder to glean if one focused instead, as is normally done, on a small number of oft-performed canonical works by a few great masters.

The present “Coda” offers reflections on the implications of those six essays for a continuing exploration of important themes in the history of Western art music, including romanticism, modernism, “progress,” tonality, text-music relations, and nationalism (including the …

In Black And White, Or Gray? Two World War I Settings Of Walt Whitman’S Poem “Reconciliation”: By Helen Hopekirk (1915), And By Ivor Gurney (1919), James Porter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Musical settings of Walt Whitman’s poems have proliferated ever since the turn of the twentieth century. Many of these settings were by British composers reacting to the effects of World War I in Europe: the two settings of Whitman’s short poem “Reconciliation” (1865–66) discussed here are those by the Scottish-American composer and concert pianist Helen Hopekirk (1856–1945) and the English composer and poet Ivor Gurney (1890–1937). Both settings reflect the immediate emotions aroused by the poem in the different situations in which the two composers found themselves: the immigrant Hopekirk teaching at the New England Conservatory but concerned about enlisted …

Remembering John Rothgeb (1940–2020), Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Bach And Mozart And Space And Time, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Karol Berger’s influential study, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that

“what matters to Bach . . . is not the linear flow of time from past to future . . . Rather, time is made to follow a circular route or neutralized. . . . Mozart and his contemporaries “straighten[ed] the temporal cycle into an arrow.”

The present essay suggests that, in considering the music of Bach and Mozart we are not dealing with two different concepts of time but rather with two different analogies: one with space, the other with time. It argues that, for Bach, the spatial metaphor …

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, …

How About Some Borsch With Cherries? Musorgsky’S The Marriage And The Wagnerian Leitmotif, Martin Nedbal

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This article explores the treatment of recurring motives in Modest Musorgsky’s experimental operatic fragment, The Marriage (1868). Previous commentators (Richard Taruskin and Márta Papp) have understated the significance of these motives. However, a closer examination at the musical score shows that they provide the opera with a certain degree of dramaturgical and musical coherence. Musorgsky’s motives also frequently comment on the dramatic procedures onstage. Furthermore, Musorgsky’s motivic work in this opera prefigures what he will do in the two versions of Boris Godunov. Therefore, The Marriage can be compared to the work of other opera composers of the time who …

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 …

“It Takes A Big Thrust To Destabilize An Entrenched Practice”: On Taruskin And The Western Traditions, Ronit Seter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This memorial essay begins with a brief appreciation of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music and its critical reception (Susan McClary, Charles Rosen). It continues with comments on the early stages of his career, noting his strategic pincer movement, that is, a pivot from his early research on Russian operas—to his 1980 groundbreaking JAMS article on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on the one hand, and a source reading book (Weiss-Taruskin, 1984) on the other. Both became essential for launching his career, and for our field. I then delve into several of Taruskin’s core ideas—about current and past …

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 …

Transforming “The Ox”, Christopher Gibbs

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This reminiscence recounts my experience transforming Richard Taruskin’s six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music into a single-volume textbook. At Taruskin’s suggestion, I was approached in 2005 by Oxford University Press to see if I was interested in taking on the daunting task of drastically abridging, extensively reshaping, and judiciously augmenting his monumental history. I did so with practical considerations in mind: limitations on space, concrete pedagogical aims, and sharing his desire to tell a compelling story. I worked with editors of the accompanying anthologies and recordings to decide which compositions should receive particular attention and emphasis. In this article, …

Thoughts Upon Richard Taruskin’S Yahrzeit, Scott Gleason

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Teaching portions of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music to non-music majors at Columbia University (in the early 2000s) offered special opportunities and challenges. Taruskin’s musical ethics, central to that book, are clearly embodied in his writings about John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. The Princeton School of composer-theorists is a litmus test of Taruskin’s thinking: in particular, Taruskin’s emphasis on music criticism can aid in an analysis of Roger Sessions’s 1958 String Quintet. David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …

“Good For You!”: Remembering Richard Taruskin, Anna Dalos

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin was a major promoter of Eastern European music. His interest was also shaped by his personal contacts, particularly in Hungary, where he visited more frequently in his later years, presenting at conferences. He developed close relations with several representatives of Hungarian musicology, among them Katalin Komlós, László Somfai, László Vikárius, and Tibor Tallián. In addition to presenting conference keynote lectures, and later courses at the Doctoral School of the Liszt Academy of Music, Taruskin also participated in the advisory board of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, and became an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. …

Richard Taruskin And His Russian Music, Marina Ritzarev

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s contribution to Russian-music studies can profitably be viewed through a historiographic lens. A comparison of the Russian-Soviet and American schools of musicology shows that both were strongly influenced by the same source – the German fin-de-siècle tradition shaped by Hugo Riemann, Hermann Abert, Hermann Kretzschmar, and others. Brought to the United States by German scholars who fled the Nazis, this tradition was transmitted by Paul Henry Lang in his seminal book Music in Western Civilization (1941). On the Russian side, distorted by the ideologized and emphatically nationalistic doctrine of socialist imperialism, it was carefully preserved by those who …