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 sonic reality, and as an attempt at a special kind of communication with his or her audience. In this latter capacity the musical work becomes an unspoken or hidden challenge to the listener as a kind of in-group or insider knowledge. Listening thus becomes a window into the creative act, bands and their audiences forming an extended community based on trust, respect and a sense of shared ownership.
Publication details:Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany, edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith, 119-41. Farnham, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
Publication details:A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, edited by Lee Palmer Wandel, 445-65. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 46. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014.
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 theories for explaining this music, the theory of musical transformations is especially productive. Not only does its notion of a transformational graph offer a powerful, hierarchical view of musical relationships, but it also embraces a processive attitude toward musical form that has broad applicability. This article identifies four specifically temporal aspects of transformational theory that have been neglected in the recent literature and demonstrates how they can inform understanding of a variety of post-tonal music much more recent than the modernist works to which the theory has mostly been applied. The demonstrations proceed through detailed analytical consideration of compositions by Kurtág, Adams, Adès, Sheng, Haas, and Saariaho.
Abstract: When you rent—whether it’s a car, a beach house, or even a harp—you are at the mercy of the previous renters. What you have to work with can be less than ideal—beat up, messy, poorly maintained. The same is true when it comes to rental music.
Rental parts comprise much of the music we play in large ensembles. Often the parts are marked so poorly that the beleaguered harpist has to cast about for a good eraser and a handkerchief into which to sob—but it doesn’t have to be that way.
We’re all on the same team here, and leaving an unintelligible mess for the next harpist will come back to haunt you eventually. The next person who gets that mess of a part might be you, your student, or even your appalled teacher.
So for the common good, I offer some guidelines for marking rental parts.
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 the dynamics through which the revisions to the score became a standard local practice and to assess historiographical assumptions about the role of Italian opera in nineteenth-century Viennese musical life.
The shape Elisir took in the city was the result of interactions between the first interpreter of the leading female role in Vienna, soprano Eugenia Tadolini, impresarios, local music publishers, spectators, and critics. Surviving evidence shows that Tadolini’s performative choices became normative in Vienna. Vocal embellishments that she added to Adina’s second-act aria, published soon after the opera’s premiere in Vienna, survive in performing materials still used at the beginning of the twentieth century. She also substituted the second-act finale of the opera with a virtuosic waltz by Luigi Ricci. This second modification was a telling instance of Tadolini’s attention to the reaction of the Viennese to Donizetti’s work. By claiming the right to close the opera with an aria of her choice, Tadolini got rid of an unappreciated piece and reinforced the local reception of Elisir as an opera centered on the prima donna.
As the development of a Viennese performing tradition of the opera extended beyond the Italian seasons at the Kärtnterthortheater, involving individuals and communities of spectators of diverse national origins, the work functioned as a catalyst for the merging of musical experiences from different parts of the Austrian Empire. As Donizetti himself decided to conceive his own waltzing cabaletta for Tadolini in 1842, I ultimately suggest that this case study recalibrates our understanding of the relationship between authorial intentions and local performing traditions.
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 musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound–including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony–not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries.
Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state’s dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular “noise” more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.
