Music and Sound Studies

Thesaurus litaniarium: The Symbolism and Practice of Musical Litanies in Counter-Reformation Germany

Thesaurus litaniarium: The Symbolism and Practice of Musical Litanies in Counter-Reformation Germany

Author: Fisher, Alexander Publication details: Early Music History 34 (2015): 45-95. Weblink: https://cambridge.org Abstract: A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral […]

Bartók’s Grooves: Metrical Processes in the Fourth String Quartet

Author: Roeder, John Publication details: Bartók’s String Quartets: Tradition and Legacy, edited by Harald Krebs and Daniel Biro, 81-107.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 Weblink: http://www.oupcanada.com Abstract: Many passages in Bela Bartók’s string quartets resemble the repeated pattern, or grooves, of popular and world music. The fourth quartet, for instance, exposes extended periodicities near the beginning of […]

Rhythmic Play, Compositional Intent, and Communication in Rock Music

Author: Hesselink, Nathan Publication details: Popular Music 33, no. 1 (2014): 69-90. Weblink: https://www.cambridge.org Abstract: This paper focuses on the use of rhythmic play in the compositional strategies of rock musicians. Such play is seen as both embodying an attitude on the part of the performer-composer in which music as pure structure tests one’s skill and imagination in […]

Transformation in Post-Tonal Music

Author: Roeder, John Publication details: Oxford Handbooks Online in Music, ed. Alexander Rehding.  New York: Oxford University Press Weblink: http://oxfordhandbooks.com Abstract: Post-tonal music (loosely, most Western art-music compositions since the turn of the 20th century) manifests many organizational techniques but not the processes of harmony and counterpoint that direct and articulate time in tonal music. Of the diverse […]

The Ethnomusicologist as Composer

Author: Hesselink, Nathan Publication details: Music and Culture 31:31-44 (2014)

Adina par excellence: Eugenia Tadolini and the Performing Tradition of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in Vienna

Author: Vellutini, Claudio Publication details: Nineteenth-Century Music 38, no. 1 (2014): 3-29 Weblink: http://ncm.ucpress.edu Abstract: Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore was subjected to a series of substantial modifications after its premiere in 1832. In this article I focus on the performing tradition of the opera in Vienna. The history of these performances and their reception allow us to examine […]

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria

Author: Fisher, Alexander Publication details: The New Cultural History of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Weblink:  https://global.oup.com Abstract: Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a […]