{"title":"Reading, listening, and performing in Wilhelm Heinse’s Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796)","authors":"T. Irvine","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.502","url":null,"abstract":"Early in Wilhelm Heinse’s eccentric novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796) his characters confront the problem of how music works on the senses. The novel’s hero, Kapellmeister Lockmann, tunes a piano—to an idiosyncratic temperament of his own invention—as he proposes an intensely physical model for musical listening. He uses this demonstration, while simultaneously trying to start a love affair with the novel’s heroine, Hildegard von Hohenthal, to reclaim older ideas about natural temperaments and key characteristics in an era of heightened interest in the anatomy of cognition. But Heinse’s own opinions are not always the same as those of his characters. Drawing on his notebooks, I trace how Heinse struggled to come to terms with opposing views of his friend and colleague, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering, and of the philosopher Immanuel Kant of how sound affects the body. Soemmering’s Uber das Organ der Seele (1796) and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) both act as intertexts and paratexts to the novel, and Heinse more than once splits his own opinions about both books between his characters. The tuning scene addresses important questions about the hierarchy of the senses, the creation of musical meaning, and the freedom of performers and listeners to form their own interpretations of music. Heinse’s naturalist ideas about musical agency rub against the grain of a narrative—still current today—dominated by a transaction between heroic composers on the one side and awe-struck listeners on the other. To re-assess these ideas is to re-imagine a crucial hinge in music history.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124973567","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":"Prokofiev and the Myth of the Father of Nations: The Cantata Zdravitsa","authors":"V. Orlov","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.577","url":null,"abstract":"Prokofiev’s cantata Zdravitsa (1939) was appreciated by Soviet officialdom immediately upon its premiere, and its fame lasted throughout subsequent decades. In post-Stalin times, however, critics re-evaluated the cantata, arguing that Zdravitsa had not been written as pro-Stalinist propaganda. Eventually, the idea that it was not Stalin but “the people” whom Prokofiev actually glorified in this cantata became the accepted interpretation of the piece, unchallenged even today. Based on insights drawn from the musical and literary sources of Zdravitsa , its relationship to the pseudo-folk Soviet tradition, and its critical reception, the present article proposes a revised framework for interpretation. I show that Prokofiev’s cantata fully corresponds to the Stalinist cultural Myth of the Father of Nations, as represented in Soviet arts and media. Examining archival sources and scholarly literature, I describe the official demands on the cantata. In the second part of the essay I undertake a thorough exploration of the music, identifying its adherence to Socialist Realist aesthetics in Stalin’s times.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126899993","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":"Hockets as Compositional and Scribal Practice in the ars nova Motet—A Letter from Lady Music","authors":"Anna Zayaruznaya","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.461","url":null,"abstract":"The whimsical upper-voice texts of the anonymous fourteenth-century motet Musicalis / Sciencie stage an epistolary exchange between Rhetoric, Music, and a long list of French composers and singers. The letters complain that these musicians, whose ranks include Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, split words with rests when they write hockets. The critical tone of Musicalis / Sciencie implies that some ars nova composers must have regularly split words with hockets, while others—the motet’s composer, for one—held this to be bad practice. But since modern editions and medieval scribes alike are imprecise in the placement of text around hockets, the existence of such opposing camps seems difficult to substantiate. An analysis of text-note alignment in four sources for Apta / Flos reveals that some scribes were prescriptive in their texting of hockets, while others, like the scribe of the important Ivrea codex, were pragmatic. An awareness of these differences can lead to alternate modes of interpreting ambiguous text underlay. In the case of Philippe de Vitry’s Petre / Lugentium , shifting syllables adjacent to hockets can transform the work, highlighting carefully differentiated textural zones that are key to its structure. Such editorial intervention can in turn yield fresh insight into competing compositional approaches.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129395437","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":"Volga-Volga: “The Story of a Song,” Vernacular Modernism, and the Realization of Soviet Music","authors":"P. Kupfer","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.4.530","url":null,"abstract":"Volga-Volga (1938), the third musical comedy made by the Soviet director-composer team of Grigory Aleksandrov and Isaak Dunayevsky, is one of the most emblematic films of the Soviet 1930s. Indeed, it won its makers a Stalin Prize in 1941 and was supposedly Stalin’s favorite film. But Volga-Volga was also a success with Soviet viewers: they flocked by the millions to see the film, which was still playing in theaters at the outbreak of war in June 1941. As a combination of slapstick comedy and memorable musical numbers that addressed an appropriately Soviet theme, the film clearly spoke to both the masses and officials. But what does Volga-Volga have to say? The film tells the story of a musical “civil war” between a folk ensemble and a classical orchestra, both of which head to Moscow to participate in the national musical Olympiad. Due to “accidental” circumstances, the two ensembles eventually join forces and win the competition with a performance of the “Song about the Volga.” Though this merger of musical forces and styles seems to serve predominantly comedic purposes, the “story of a song” can also be read as a commentary on the development of music in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In a period marked by debates and uncertainties in all realms of musical production about what exactly Socialist Realist music was to be, Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky offer as their solution a musical practice that advocates inclusivity by seeking to combine features from many types of music into a distinctly Soviet blend. This thematization of music is enhanced by the nature of the film musical, whose stylistic reliance on music as a bridge between real and ideal worlds embodies the aesthetic demands of Socialist Realism. Furthermore, the film can be understood as an instance of what film scholar Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” namely, the adaptation of an American cinematic model into a foreign context as a tool for reflecting and refracting experiences of modernity.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133633955","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":"Study, Copy, and Conquer: Schumann’s 1842 Chamber Music and the Recasting of Classical Sonata Form","authors":"J. H. Brown","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.369","url":null,"abstract":"Schumann9s 1842 chamber music exemplifies a common theme in his critical writings, that to sustain a notable inherited tradition composers must not merely imitate the past but reinvent it anew. Yet Schumann9s innovative practices have not been sufficiently acknowledged, partly because his instrumental repertory seemed conservative to critics of Schumann9s day and beyond, especially when compared to his earlier experimental piano works and songs. This essay offers a revisionist perspective by exploring three chamber movements that recast sonata procedure in one of two complementary ways: either the tonic key monopolizes the exposition (as in the first movement of the Piano Quartet in E♭ major, op. 47), or a modulating main theme undercuts a definitive presence of the tonic key at the outset (as in the first movement of the String Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3, and the finale of the String Quartet in A minor, op. 41, no. 1). Viewed against conventional sonata practice, these chamber movements appear puzzling, perhaps even incoherent or awkward, since they thwart the tonal contrast of keys so characteristic of the form. Yet these unusual openings, and the compelling if surprising ramifications that they prompt, signal not compositional weakness but rather an effort to reinterpret the form as a way of strengthening its expressive power. My analyses also draw on other perspectives to illuminate these sonata forms. All three movements adopt a striking thematic idea or formal ploy that evokes a specific Beethovenian precedent; yet each movement also highlights Schumann’s creative distance from his predecessor by departing in notable ways from the conjured model. Aspects of Schumann’s sketches, especially those concerning changes made during the compositional process, also illuminate relevant analytical points. Finally, in the analysis of the finale of the A-minor quartet, I consider how Schumann’s evocation of Hungarian Gypsy music may be not merely incidental to but supportive of his reimagined sonata form. Ultimately, the perspectives offered here easily accommodate—even celebrate—Schumann’s idiosyncratic approach to sonata form. They also demonstrate that Schumann’s earlier experimental tendencies did not contradict his efforts in the early 1840s to further advance his inherited classical past.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127071703","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":"Debussy’s Toy Stories","authors":"Simon A. Morrison","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.424","url":null,"abstract":"Research in Moscow, New York, Paris, and Stockholm uncovers the compositional and early performance histories of Debussy’s ballet pantomime for children, The Toy Box. Surprisingly, the first large-scale production took place in Moscow, not Paris, and Henri Forterre—in advance of Andre Caplet—completed the orchestration after Debussy’s death. Theater directors and choreographers variously interpret Debussy’s distinctive approach to creating music for children as having been influenced by the designs of his scenarist, Andre Helle. Although newly uncovered source materials might permit a reconstruction of The Toy Box , to do so would be to violate the spirit of the ballet, which embraces the imagined over the real and, paradoxically, the permanence of the ephemeral.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124522760","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":"Spiritual Narratives in Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 132","authors":"J. Ito","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.330","url":null,"abstract":"This paper, taking its cue from the movement’s heading, reads the “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Beethoven’s String Quartet, op. 132, in terms of spirituality, divinity, and death, following a formal narrative understood in terms of Eastern-influenced conceptions of death and afterlife found in Beethoven’s Tagebuch. It has often been noted that the movements of op. 132 present extremely strong contrasts with one another, and this paper draws connections between the narrative shapes of the various movements and several of the quite varied spiritual perspectives explored by Beethoven. Viewed in this way, op. 132 synthesizes two of the areas in which Maynard Solomon has argued that Beethoven was open to multiple contrasting and even contradictory possibilities—the musical and the spiritual. The contrasts and conflicts among the movements and among the spiritual narratives that they suggest add new dimensions to inter-opus connections as well, giving new depth to the intertextual relationship between the String Quartet, op. 132, and the Ninth Symphony.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121993960","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 Middle Style/Late Style Dialectic: Problematizing Adorno’s Theory of Beethoven","authors":"Jeffrey Swinkin","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.3.287","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I aim both to elucidate and to problematize Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s middle and late styles as essentially dichotomous. Specifically, Adorno holds that the middle-style works express the utter interdependency of the subjective and objective spheres in their emphasis upon organic wholeness and totality. By contrast, the late-style works express the alienation of subject from object in isolating and laying bare musical conventions. Yet middle Beethoven, as Adorno himself intimates, often calls organic unity into question, especially with respect to the recapitulation and coda in a sonata-form piece. Moreover, although Adorno does not seem to acknowledge it, the middle style exhibits fragmentation both in partitioning the sonata principle into subprinciples and, more concretely, in partitioning a theme into various subcomponents. Conversely, using Schenkerian techniques, one can expose sub-thematic unity underlying foreground fragmentation in the late works (as demonstrated by Daniel Chua and Kevin Korsyn). Drawing on Schenker’s reading, I use Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A, op. 101 as a case study. In the second half of the essay I confront the political connotations of Adorno’s argument, again problematizing particular stylistic binarisms with respect to issues of freedom, solidarity, and hope.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133473475","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 Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord","authors":"Edmond Johnson","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.2.180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.2.180","url":null,"abstract":"Though far from being the only historical instrument to receive renewed attention during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, the harpsichord holds a special place in the history of the early music revival. No other instrument played as visible—or, perhaps, as controversial—a role in popularizing musical activities during the revival. As a large and visually distinctive presence, the harpsichord has a tendency to garner attention wherever it appears, whether in a museum case or on the concert hall stage. In this article I explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-century “death” and its subsequent revival—the two periods of its history that have been most neglected. By reexamining the ways in which the harpsichord was portrayed in both words and images, I show that the instrument’s eventual acceptance in the twentieth century was far from being a fait accompli but depended largely on an extensive and deliberate renegotiation of both its image and its cultural identity. In the first half of the article I explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-century existence as an evocative emblem of a vanished past: an instrument turned relic that was frequently laden with supernatural literary tropes and ghostly imagery. In the second section I examine the instrument’s revival, focusing on the ways in which the harpsichord was brought before modern audiences, ultimately in a form that was heavily reengineered and reconfigured. Indeed, in its journey from museum piece to modern musical instrument the harpsichord underwent a marked transformation of both form and character. The process involved a gradual rejection of much of the cultural baggage the harpsichord had accrued during its long dormancy in the nineteenth century and resulted in a transformation that ultimately won it a place in the modern musical world.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133095310","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":"Klingende Buchstaben: Principles of Alfred Schnittke's Monogram Technique","authors":"Christopher Segall","doi":"10.1525/JM.2013.30.2.252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2013.30.2.252","url":null,"abstract":"Many composers have incorporated monograms into their music, using pitch letters to spell out words and names. Alfred Schnittke9s monogram technique pervades his works from the 1970s until the end of his career. He derived cryptograms from the names of performer-dedicatees, influential composers, and recently deceased friends, using a systematic procedure that accounts in some way for every possible letter in a given name. Although previous scholars have identified individual monograms in some works, the broader principles by which Schnittke generated and deployed his monograms had not been articulated until now. Many of Schnittke9s monograms thus remained unidentified, and the ways in which they interact with twelve-tone technique had not been fully understood. Schnittke appropriated the well-known B–A–C–H and D–S–C–H monograms frequently, but other monograms appear in more than a dozen works. He derived monograms for Russian names from their German transliterations. Schnittke adhered to a principle of chromatic complementation, often integrating monograms into statements of the complete aggregate of twelve pitch classes. I interpret Schnittke’s monogram technique as a facet of the composer’s memorializing impulse, by which he sought to establish in his music the deep connections he felt to the past and the important people in his life.","PeriodicalId":413730,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Musicology","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133958252","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}