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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 …

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 …

“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 …

Contributors To Issue 6

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

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 …

“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 …

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 …

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.

Beethoven The European, Edited By Malcolm Miller And William Kinderman. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 [Review]., Jürgen Thym

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.”

Mozart’S Jewish Librettist: A Brief History Of A Poorly Kept Secret, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s three greatest Italian operas, was born a Jew, a fact rumored about during his lifetime but not definitively established until 1900. The treatment (or not) of Da Ponte’s Jewish origins as documented from his time to the present constitutes a history of concealment, rumor, discovery, denigration, and exploitation. Its nadir was reached during the Nazi period, its zenith most recently, as the poet, hitherto a secondary player in the Mozart biographies, has emerged as the colorful protagonist in substantial biographies of his own.

Indigenous Form, Innovative Harmony, And Ingenious Rhythm In Manuel De Falla’S “Aragonesa”, Richard E. Mueller

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The literature on the music of Manuel de Falla has called ample attention to the striking stylistic developments in Falla’s music of the 1920s. The familiar sound of Spain was replaced by the acerbic neo-classic idiom identified with the music of Stravinsky. The issue is complex. Falla’s new music continued to draw on Spanish resources and technical aspects of harmony and rhythm reflect continuities that can be traced back to the earliest works of Falla’s maturity, namely, the Cuatro piezas españolas (1909). The first of these pieces “Aragonesa” was composed largely in 1906, and before Falla re-located in Paris and …

Music, A Connected Art/Die Illusion Der Absoluten Musik: A Festschrift For Jürgen Thym On His 80th Birthday, Ed. Ulrich J. Blomann, David B. Levy, Ralph P. Locke, And Frieder Reininghaus. Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 2023 [Review], Sarah Clemmens Waltz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 4

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Handsomeness: A Biography Of Thomas Schippers, By Nancy Spada. Foreword By Steven Monder. Irvine, Ca: Universal Publishers, 2023 [Review], George J. Ferencz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Berlioz In Time: From Early Recognition To Lasting Renown, By Peter Bloom. Rochester, Ny: University Of Rochester Press, 2022 [Review], Trans. Ralph P. Locke., Matthieu Cailliez

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Mr Byrde Affirmes It To Be Truth, Kerry Mccarthy

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This essay briefly contemplates William Byrd’s 400th anniversary.

A Ringing Tone Of Outrage: Luigi Nono‘S Intolleranza 1960, Max Nyffeler

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza 1960, premiered at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in 1961, defiantly broke with traditional notions of opera at the time. The depiction of physical and institutional violence against people, the expansion of the stage space by slide projections, and sounds coming from loudspeakers as well as a music that expressed constant unrest and protest provoked audiences into taking a stance against oppression and injustice. The work caused a scandal at the time of the premiere, but has since established itself as an opera that articulates, through Nono’s music, a timeless human truth in a ringing …

Berlioz's Mysterious Amélie, Pascal Beyls, Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In September 1864, in a letter to his long-time confidante, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Berlioz mentioned the name of the woman with whom, as he had earlier confided to the Princess, he had conducted a brief but passionate affair: “her name was Amélie.” Until now, the Berlioz scholars have been unable properly to identify this mysterious person. From other letters and documents, including Ernest Legouvé’s Soixante ans de souvenirs, we have known the approximate dates of the beginning and ending of the relationship. But only now, on the basis of the birth and death certificates of the woman and …

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.

Contributors To Issue 3

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Liszt’S Representation Of Instrumental Sounds On The Piano: Colors In Black And White, By Hyun Joo Kim. Rochester, Ny: University Of Rochester Press And Boydell & Brewster Limited, 2019., David H. Plylar

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Svatopluk Havelka: Symphony No. 1 [In B-Flat Minor]. Supraphon Sua 18138 (Lp, 196?)., Stephen Thomson Moore, Tom Moore

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Two Essays On Contemporary Music, Bálint András Varga

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Bálint András Varga (1941–2019) was an advocate for and a keen critic of contemporary music, first on radio, and later as an acquisitions editor for both Editio Hungarica and Universal-Edition. He interviewed many musical figures and planned to interview visual artists before he died. His interlocutors were impressed with Varga’s insightful questions and frequently answered them much more comprehensively than they would ones from standard journalists. These two essays were intended to be published in Varga’s third book, From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir. The first, “What to Listen for in Music,” refers to Aaron Copland’s book of …

The Ossianic Maiden Colma In Compassionate View: Ferdinand Hiller’S “Colma’S Klage” (1873) And Vinzenz Lachner’S Die Klage Der Kolma (1874), James W. Porter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The widespread, positive reception of Ossianic poems in Germany and Austria inspired many musical settings from Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and perhaps also Schumann. Settings of the poetic narrative of Colma, which relates the anguish of a maiden discovering that her brother and her lover have slain each other in mortal combat, were composed by Zumsteeg, Reichardt, Schubert, and Weber. This essay examines two later settings composed in the 1870s by Ferdinand Hiller and Vinzenz Lachner. While the settings are undeniably effective in their use of common idioms of German composition in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, they are …

Contributors To Issue 2

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.