{"title":"Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Lohengrin and its Use as a Wedding March","authors":"MATTHIAS RANGE","doi":"10.1017/rma.2023.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2023.5","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The ‘Bridal Chorus’ of Wagner’s 1850 opera <span>Lohengrin</span> is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world. This article explores how it became so inextricably associated with wedding ceremonies – real ones, or on stage and in film. Furthered by its use at several British royal weddings the music was especially popular at wedding ceremonies in Britain and the USA. Notwithstanding that the chorus was usually performed in an instrumental arrangement, its attractiveness as wedding music was strengthened by various new English texts, its popular title of ‘Here comes the Bride’ deriving from a 1915 silent film. On a different level, this study contextualizes and evaluates the long-lasting criticism of the use of Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ at wedding ceremonies. Proportional to the decline in its actual use, this criticism has now mostly gone; yet, the ‘Bridal Chorus’ remains as the archetypical music to represent the arrival of the bride.</p>","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140580294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enter Children, with Childhood","authors":"T. F. COOMBES","doi":"10.1017/rma.2023.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2023.8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anglo-American musicology is having a childhood moment. The foundation of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Childhood Study Group marked this moment most clearly, together with the launch in 2021 of an accompanying website maintained by Susan Boynton and Ryan Bunch.<span>1</span> Not that children and childhood are anything new as a topic of enquiry in music studies: since the mid- to late twentieth century, children’s musical cultures have formed a steadily expanding subject for ethnomusicologists, to some extent predating the institutionalization of the study of childhood in anthropology generally.<span>2</span> Since Boynton and Roe-Min Kok published an early state-of-the-field collection in 2006 (as the outgrowth of an International Musicological Society conference), studies of music and childhood have burgeoned principally at the intersection of ethnomusicology and other fields – notably popular music, as in Kyra D. Gaunt’s <span>The Games Black Girls Play</span>, as well as music education and technology studies, both of which intertwine in Tyler Bickford’s <span>Schooling New Media.</span><span>3</span> At present, the relation between popular music, mass media and youth culture forms the most prominent subject of musicological debate about childhood.<span>4</span> Contrary, then, to the implications of this article’s title, we might say as music scholars that children have always been around, but that large parts of the discipline have not paid them much attention.</p>","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139656611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Round Table: A ‘Musical League of Nations’? Music Institutions and the Politics of Internationalism between the Wars","authors":"S. Collins, Barbara L. Kelly, L. Tunbridge","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.24","url":null,"abstract":"This round table grew out of two gatherings in 2018–19 that endeavoured to bring musicologists into dialogue with recent revisions in the history of international relations.1 Our specific focus was the interwar period, more often discussed in terms of nationalism – or perhaps at best transnationalism – than within the context of internationalism, a principle that lay behind the foundation of elite governmental organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and others. As the historians Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin have shown, the construction of objects of global governance by these organizations ran alongside a broader sweep of non-governmental groupings that forwarded the interests of indigenous, working-class, anti-colonialist, anti-slavery and feminist causes.2 What role or roles did music play in these contexts? The case studies that follow illustrate the far-reaching implications of internationalist policies for musical institutions, groups and individuals.","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"557 - 560"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44269084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RMA volume 147 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rma.2023.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2023.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":" ","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45779192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RMA volume 147 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rma.2023.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2023.2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"b1 - b1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43847764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reconstructing a ‘Special Relationship’ from Scattered Archives: America, Britain, Europe and the ISCM, 1922–45","authors":"Kate Bowan","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.29","url":null,"abstract":"In an account of the early history of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for a 1946 BBC broadcast, president of the ISCM Edward Dent recounted the ‘two main reasons’ why London was proposed as the society’s initial headquarters at that first meeting in 1922 in Salzburg. Firstly, he maintained, ‘it stood apart from all the quarrels and jealousies of the Continent’, and secondly, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, he outlined a triangulated relationship: ‘[London] was regarded as a link between Europe and America.’ ‘American music’, he continued, ‘really needed that link in those days; and the general feeling of the European musicians was that they would provide the music and England the money to pay for it.’ But then (again using ‘the Continent’ and ‘Europe’ interchangeably) he signalled a profound shift: ‘Today the situation has changed. It is Europe now which needs the link with America, for America has become a great music-producing country, while it will take the Continent some little time to recover its creative energy.’262 Tantalizing though Dent’s references to ‘links’ may be, obtaining clarity on what these transatlantic connections were and how they operated has proved elusive. The telling of an international and transnational history by way of searches of nationally bounded archival collections has raised certain methodological challenges.263 Rising to meet them, however, has uncovered some interesting threads which in turn offer an alternative dimension to a story that is often told from a Eurocentric perspective; one, as already noted by the editors of this round table, which places the Austro-Germanic modernist tradition at its centre.264 Moreover, Dent’s framework of a transatlantic musical internationalism that triangulated England, Europe and America as three distinct entities with a set of different and fluid musical relationships and roles has obvious resonances today as Britain, the USA and Europe are once again struggling to rearticulate their positions in respect of each other in a rapidly shifting world order.","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"616 - 628"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46013458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Approaching Incidental Music: ‘Reflexive Performance’ and Meaning in Till Damaskus (III)","authors":"Leah Broad","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.20","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Incidental music of the early twentieth-century has received little musicological attention, despite its widespread use during this period of history. Theatres were a popular means by which audiences could interact with new music, and composers could experiment with new ideas and build collaborative relationships. Using a 1926 Swedish production of August Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III), directed by Per Lindberg with music by Ture Rangström, this article argues for the importance of analysing incidental music as collaborative performance. It explores the use of ‘reflexive performance’ as a method of analysis, combined with semiotic and intermedial approaches.","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"495 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41286701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music and Internationalism in Nazi Germany: Provenance and Post-War Consequences","authors":"Ian Pace","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.28","url":null,"abstract":"In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"594 - 616"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49537470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing Internationalism: The ISCM as a ‘Musical League of Nations’","authors":"Giles Masters","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.25","url":null,"abstract":"After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies.6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism.7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist organization of the era was the ISCM, founded in Salzburg in 1922.8 The ISCM’s principal activity during the interwar period was to organize an annual contemporary music festival. This peripatetic event, hosted in a different European city each year, served two intertwined ambitions: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation. The latter aspiration gave rise to an unofficial nickname – the ‘musical League of Nations’ – encapsulating the ISCM’s perceived affinities with other, heftier internationalist endeavours.9 A ‘musical League of Nations’ was, however, an ambivalent and precarious project: the moniker recognized, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, by way of its adjective, to a degree of detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"560 - 571"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43690605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Universal Neumes: Chant Theory in Messiaen’s Aesthetics","authors":"Jonas Lundblad","doi":"10.1017/rma.2022.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.16","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Gregorian chant exerted a pivotal influence on Olivier Messiaen’s spiritual and musical universe. Scholars have noted his theological preference for this repertoire and its central role in his organ playing, and have observed how some of Messiaen’s melodies contain obvious traces from chants. Recent analytical work has ventured further and shown how plainchant in fact served as a melodic and formal matrix behind the composer’s musical language. This article raises the additional claim that Messiaen’s employment of plainchant rested upon an idiosyncratic and questionable – but largely coherent – theory of neumes as a more or less universal feature in music. A quasi-archaeological reconstruction proves necessary to reconstruct this conception from the composer’s fragmentary and enigmatic statements. The article investigates Messiaen’s readings of Vincent d’Indy and Dom André Mocquereau, including ideas from Hugo Riemann, showing that rhythm is a most central element in their similar connections between chant and freedom of expressivity in contemporary music. All in all, chant theory is highlighted as a vital element in analyses of Messiaen’s own music, as well as a theoretical framework that explains many of the composer’s seemingly eclectic connections between different repertoires.","PeriodicalId":17438,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Musical Association","volume":"147 1","pages":"449 - 493"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43069300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}