The Journal of Musicology最新文献

{"title":"“The Pebble in the Water”: Messiaen, Debussy and the Meaning of Rhythmic Contrast","authors":"Timothy B. Cochran","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.503","url":null,"abstract":"In volume six of Traite de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie , Olivier Messiaen uses the phrase “the pebble in the water” to identify a class of especially stark rhythmic contrasts in Debussy’s music that feature long durations interrupted by rapid rhythms. He invests these contrasts with an expressive logic built around the concept of shock—that is, the sudden stimulation of a static context by an outside presence. Messiaen unites various images—both natural and psychological—around this expressive pattern via analogy, suggesting that its essence is transferrable within a network of associated metaphors. Although for the most part in volume six Messiaen refrains from linking interpretations of Debussy with his own music, many of his rhythmic contrasts manifest the same expressive logic that he ascribes to Debussy’s music, particularly durational events that signify the interjection of birdsong within serene environments and that signal the striking appearance of divine power on earth. In addition to stylistic and semiotic correlations, the logic of shock theorized for the pebble in the water recurs more abstractly in Messiaen’s idiomatic views on musical experience and spiritual encounter. His interpretation of rhythmic contrast bears the marks of his more general aesthetics of shock, which in turn can be read as a reorientation of a broader modernist hermeneutic.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116629535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In Search of Machaut’s Poietics: Music and Rhetoric in Le Remede de Fortune","authors":"J. Stokes","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.395","url":null,"abstract":"Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Remede de Fortune has often been described as a didactic work addressed to would-be poets. This essay argues that the Remede also should be read as an implicit work of rhetorical and musical instruction. To this end, the Remede is placed in dialogue with Machaut’s more explicit account of the creative process in the Prologue , with other romans a chansons, such as Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthere d9amours , and with medieval theories of rhetoric and music, eventually arriving at a rhetorical reading of the Remede 9s large-scale structure, a didactic reading of the work9s musical interpolations, and a fresh insight into Machaut9s understanding of his own creative process.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125928288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Intellectual Contexts of “the Absolute” in French Musical Aesthetics, ca. 1830–1900","authors":"Noel Verzosa","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.471","url":null,"abstract":"In 1895 the critic Edouard Dujardin reviewed a production of an Offenbach opera in a brief article titled “De la Perichole et de l’Absolu dans la musique.” That Dujardin invoked the term “absolute” in a discussion of a stage work suggests that, for him, “the absolute in music” was defined by something other than the presence or absence of texts. Moreover, that Dujardin uses the phrase “absolute in music” rather than “absolute music” suggests the terrain of the absolute was not exclusively musical. This article reveals that the word “absolute” had a rich and varied history in French intellectual discourse of the nineteenth century. By placing the writings of music critics alongside those of philosophers such as Victor Cousin, Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine, and Etienne Vacherot, I show that the word “absolute” evoked decades of ideological tensions—between Catholicism and secularism, between faith and positivism, and between monarchy and constitution—stemming from the culture wars of post-revolutionary France. Dujardin and his colleagues effectively made music criticism another arena where these battles were fought.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122607476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Jewish Female Cannibal in Two Seventeenth-Century Cantatas","authors":"D. Harrán","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.4.431","url":null,"abstract":"Laments were frequent in both cantatas and operas in the seventeenth century. The two emotions expressed in the lament were those that Aristotle connected with the essence of tragedy, namely, pity (on the fate of the one who laments) and fear (lest the observer share the same fate). Fear turns to fright in two mid-seventeenth century cantatas, in which a Jewish mother cooks her son, eats his flesh, and licks his blood in order to relieve her hunger, then bemoans her act in a lament. The present study describes examples of laments and female cannibals in Scriptures, identifies the particular female cannibal of the cantatas as Mary of Eleazar in Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War , discusses the authors of the text and the composers of the cantatas, concluding with the relationship of the texts to the music. Following Aristotle’s notions of pity and fear, authors and composers maneuver between the contrary feelings of pathos and disgust in the cantatas. The full text of both cantatas appears in the appendix.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"741 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132878833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nikolay Myaskovsky and the “Regimentation” of Soviet Composition: A Reassessment","authors":"P. Zuk","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.3.354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.3.354","url":null,"abstract":"Western studies of musical life in the USSR have typically placed great emphasis on the constraints to which composers were subject and often appear to have accepted as axiomatic the notion that the styles of Soviet composition of the Stalinist era were fundamentally conditioned by external pressures. One of the most influential formulations of this view is to be found in Boris Schwarz’s Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, which has remained a standard work of reference for over four decades. Schwarz considered the promulgation of the Communist Party’s resolution of 23 April 1932 “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organisations” to represent a fateful turning point in the fortunes of Soviet music, marking the inauguration of a stultifying new era of “regimentation” and the demise of freedoms that had remained after the persecution of leading modernists by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. According to Schwarz “advanced composers turned conventional, and conventional composers turned commonplace.” In Schwarz’s view, the newly founded Composers’ Union, just as Goebbels’s Reichsmusikkammer, presided over an artistic wasteland. In this essay I question such generalizations. I focus on Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881–1950), regarded by Schwarz as a prime example of a modernist who retreated into safe conventionality in the early 1930s after the composition of his notorious Twelfth Symphony, ostensibly written to glorify Stalin’s grandiose project of agricultural collectivization. A re-examination of the circumstances surrounding the symphony’s genesis suggests that the constructions Schwarz placed on this phase of Myaskovsky’s career are questionable. Although the composer’s harmonic language became noticeably less dissonant after 1932 than in certain works of the 1920s, I argue that this cannot be attributed solely to external pressures, as Myaskovsky’s later style evinces strong continuities with tendencies manifest in his earlier work. The essay closes by reflecting on the wider implications of these findings for our understanding of Soviet composition of the Stalinist era.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114866416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beethoven Going Blank","authors":"Daniel K. L. Chua","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.3.299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.3.299","url":null,"abstract":"A key signifier of freedom in Beethoven’s music is the “blank sign.” This sign assumes various forms. This article traces these blanks both musically and philosophically to explore how they work and what they mean. In particular, it focuses on Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy as a commentator on the composer’s own usage of this sign as a representation of freedom and progress.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129926827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why was this music desirable? On a critical explanation of the avant-garde","authors":"Michael Gallope","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.199","url":null,"abstract":"In the introduction to his Oxford History of Western Music (2005), Richard Taruskin writes that his account of music history is based in the work of individual people, their statements, and their actions, as opposed to the power of ideas, teleologies, and romantic attachments to style criticism. He also claims that a “true history” of music can overcome the survey genre by offering causal explanations of historical events. In his discussion of the Cold War avant-garde, however, Taruskin points the way toward a slightly different kind of historiography by employing what I call a critical explanation. It is based in a causal question—Why was this desirable?—but the ensuing explanation resembles the hermeneutics of suspicion typically associated with thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all of whom were skeptical of the view that individuals are agents of their actions. I argue that Taruskin’s approach to the era has a methodological upshot, enabling readers to evaluate how the Cold War avant-garde might be linked with social and intellectual history in new ways. To demonstrate this, the article begins with a theoretical discussion of causality and its complex relationship to empiricism, proceeds through a survey of Taruskin’s use of existentialism as a critical explanation of the Cold War avant-garde, and ends with an account of some historical details concerning the era’s intellectual actors that expands on a few of the issues his critical explanation presents.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123596241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ends of Music History, or: The Old Masters in the Supermarket of Cultures","authors":"Karol Berger","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.186","url":null,"abstract":"This article begins with a description of the essential features and current state of the social practice called art music, concluding that as recently as the late twentieth century it was in excellent shape, as documented by a series of canonic masterpieces. I continue with an outline of the principal questions pursued by, and the current state of, music history, demonstrating that it too was flourishing in the same period, producing work of enduring worth. In conclusion, I consider the main dangers that currently threaten a successful cultivation of music history. These include our inability to notice historical developments that really matter when we are blinded by thinking in terms of group identities, and the unfortunate confluence of two recent cultural trends: the flood of ever new products of the music (or entertainment) industry, combined with our inability and unwillingness to discriminate.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114341878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History","authors":"P. Schmelz","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.231","url":null,"abstract":"In 1980 Soviet Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov began a series of “postludes,” a genre representing, in his words, a “collecting of echoes, a form opening not to the end, as is more usual, but to the beginning.” This article examines Silvestrov’s Symphony no. 5 (1980–82), and the theory, practice, and reception of his evolving “post” style. The symphony represents a unique congruence of modernism and postmodernism, nostalgia and continuity, expressed at the end of the Soviet Union, the end of the twentieth century, and what many believed to be the end of history. Completed near the conclusion of the Brezhnev period of stagnation, the symphony was intended to assuage the public’s acute dissatisfaction with life in the USSR. Yet when it was first heard in the mid-1980s, it offered a comforting familiarity amid the bewildering acceleration of perestroika. Examining Silvestrov’s “post” style requires considering the sociocultural impact of his sense of ending by treating his eschatology as a useful fiction that illuminates the conflicting sensations of stasis and acceleration during the last decades of the USSR. This article draws on interviews with Silvestrov and his close associates, as well as the Silvestrov Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115498613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agents and Causes and Ends, Oh My","authors":"R. Taruskin","doi":"10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2014.31.2.272","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129155505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}