{"title":"The Unknown Music of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana","authors":"Andreas Giger","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.3.255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.3.255","url":null,"abstract":"Shortly before the premiere of Cavalleria rusticana, Pietro Mascagni cut 246 measures from his opera. This substantial section of music has remained largely unknown and has never been examined. Recent access to the original prompter's score, the score once in the possession of the first conductor (Leopoldo Mugnone), autograph letters, unexplored reviews, and a rediscovered staging manual have made a thorough evaluation of the cuts possible. These cuts fall into three categories: (1) those tightening the pace, (2) those reducing the taxing part of the chorus, and (3) those accommodating transpositions requested at the last minute by the star singers Gemma Bellincioni (Santuzza) and Roberto Stagno (Turiddu). The article argues that the cuts had consequences beyond their originally intended function, affecting the staging, drama, and formal conception. In the “Introduzione,” for instance, they lead to confusion about the way in which the scene should be staged; in the “Sortita di Alfio,” they eliminate music that functioned as the culmination of the aria's large-scale formal plan; and in the composite No. 5, they exaggerate the so-called dramaturgy of harsh junctures. In short, these cuts shed important light on the composer's original dramatic intentions and technical aspirations, and have lingered for over one hundred years without being considered for reinstatement.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90178633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wenzel Mihule and the Reception of Don Giovanni in Central Europe","authors":"Martin Nedbal","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.66","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.66","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the previously overlooked transmission of a German Singspiel adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled Don Juan, oder Die redende Statue, the adaptation originated with the troupe of Wenzel Mihule at the Patriotic Theater in Prague in the early 1790s and, initially at least, took fewer liberties with the opera than other German reworkings, possibly because it was created in an environment sensitive to Mozart’s Italian original. The adaptation was picked up by Emauel Schikaneder’s company in Vienna, by companies across Moravia, and by Joseph Seconda’s troupe in Leipzig and Dresden, and it traveled with Mihule from Prague to southern Germany and Slovakia. Newly discovered archival documents associated with Mihule’s Don Juan shed light on the early German-language history of Don Giovanni, illustrating, in particular, its reception outside of large urban centers—in smaller towns, aristocratic palaces, and a monastery. This article argues, moreover, that the lack of scholarly attention to the adaptation is to a large extent connected to national politics in central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically to Czech-German ethnic tensions and conflicts.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80571644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting the Music-Printing Market in Seventeenth-Century Italy and the Peculiar Case of Pietro Millioni’s Guitar Books","authors":"Gideon Brettler","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Italian music-printing industry in the seventeenth century from two distinct perspectives. The first revisits the industry’s decline and the circumstances that led to that state of affairs. The second traces the unlikely commercial success of the guitar tutors of Pietro Millioni, offering a glimpse into the inner workings of the industry. A quantitative analysis of production patterns using a newly constructed database of seventeenth-century Italian music prints provides a nuanced view of the rise and fall in output across various printing centers. Cross-referencing these data with an analysis of the corpora of the leading printing houses of Venice and Rome exposes various idiosyncrasies of these two centers of music printing and suggests that the downturn in production was driven not only by domestic conditions but also by the gradual decline of Venice as a dominant international economy.\u0000 The music in the Millioni books is printed with an idiomatic notation for the guitar known as alfabeto. The simplicity of alfabeto notation offered the musically illiterate an accessible path to music making, while its typographical features offered printers a cheap and easy method of printing music without specialized equipment or expertise. The continued success of these books in a contracting market demonstrates the significant appeal of this music for both printer and consumer, which contributed to the codification of oral musical traditions in print. The reconstruction of the genealogy of the Millioni books discloses numerous commercial ties between publishers, as well as their influence over musical content.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79521880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Instrument or Appliance? The RCA Theremin, Gender, Labor, and Domesticity","authors":"C. Latham","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.1.35","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between domestic music making, technological innovation, and labor through a case study of the marketing of the RCA Theremin in 1929. Shortly after the arrival of Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the United States in 1928, plans to develop the Theremin as a commercial musical instrument for the home quickly took shape, aligning it with other commercialized domestic appliances. But the nature of the labor that the Theremin promised, according to its marketers, was different than the labor afforded by the vacuum cleaner or lightbulb: it promised to perform musical work. The domestic sphere was changing with the introduction of appliances to assist housewives in middle-class American homes. This involved changes in audio culture as well. Many forms of musical listening were moving from a public to a domestic sphere via the introduction of the phonograph and radio. The phonograph afforded housewives the convenience of playing Saint-Saëns in their parlors without the labor of practicing the piano, just as the electric light saved them the effort of attending to oil lamps. Marketing materials for the RCA Theremin promoted the instrument as a labor-saving device, aiming to fulfill the role of the piano in middle-class American homes but eradicating the need for practicing. I argue that this promise implicitly reveals the labor of domestic music making, which, like other forms of domestic labor, has been historically rendered invisible within a capitalistic system that values productive over reproductive labor.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72717310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ligatures and Musical Meaning","authors":"P. Kolb","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.3.306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.3.306","url":null,"abstract":"In mensural notation, certain combinations of notes could be notated either individually or bound together as ligatures. The choice of whether or not to use a ligature provided an opportunity for composers and scribes to encode different types of musical meaning. It has long been accepted that ligatures could help to show text underlay, and scholars have also proposed that ligatures could clarify aspects of musical structure, such as melodic and rhythmic patterns, phrasing, and articulation. It is difficult to prove wide applicability of these proposals, not least because they tend to rely primarily on the evidence of practical sources. Fortunately, there is more theoretical evidence about the purpose and function of ligatures than has been heretofore recognized. While much of the evidence unsurprisingly points toward the textual significance of ligatures, a substantial amount of theory from the early fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century shows that ligatures were also important for clarifying aspects of mensural context, sometimes forcing perfection and alteration. The evidence leads us to reconsider widely held assumptions about the significance of ligatures and to look beyond text underlay as the primary meaning that may (or may not) be signified. Drawing on these insights, contextual analysis of notation can provide a clearer window into the concerns and priorities of composers and scribes.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84260733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensibility in Haydn’s Topical Art","authors":"Keri Hui","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.4.432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.4.432","url":null,"abstract":"In Haydn’s keyboard music, sensibility displays distinct localized manifestations, and it also proves its capability to encompass several musical signifiers. By examining and contextualizing the use of the sigh, the tempesta, and the toccata topos in Haydn’s keyboard sonatas Hob. XVI:20, 49, and 46, this article aims both to demonstrate that sensibility may be signified by multiple topics and to call attention to the value of studying Haydn’s topical art. The three topics in Haydn’s keyboard sonatas each reveal a particular facet of sensibility, thereby testifying to the rich complexity of this human quality much cherished in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76459714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Articulating Urban Culture with Coach Horns in the Long Nineteenth Century","authors":"Nicole Vilkner","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.2.225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.2.225","url":null,"abstract":"Postal horns have been associated traditionally with bucolic topics in music. From Mozart to Mahler, the instrument appears in orchestral textures and songs to signify nostalgia for preindustrial rural life. The history of the coach horn, originally the standard postal instrument used on the British Royal Mail fleets, branched unexpectedly away from this paradigm when it was adopted for recreational use by socialites in urban areas in England, France, and other metropolitan hubs during the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition to performing the traditional road signals, driving enthusiasts expanded the musical vocabulary of the coach horn to include elaborate fanfares and stylized ensemble music. Tracing the undocumented recreational history of the coach horn, this article interrogates coach horn manuals, compositions, and essays on coaching that overturn traditional assumptions about the instrument. These sources illustrate how coach horn signals helped reframe driving from a service activity to a healthful sport. Examining the rhetoric surrounding the coach horn during the period of its revival, this study shows how the new signals reflected promenade and salon culture by mimicking polite dialogue. The ensemble repertory written for coach horns also catered to urban popular taste and was cultivated to enhance metropolitan social events. Analysis further illustrates how revivalist fanfares aurally articulated social status in the outdoor urban arena. This case study ultimately traces the cultural evolution of an instrument, a complex process through which old and new musical expectations were negotiated through composition and practice.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79413169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Primitive, Exotic, and Australian","authors":"R. Campbell","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.4.405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.4.405","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the main themes in the critical reception of John Antill’s orchestral ballet Corroboree (1944), a musical representation of Indigenous culture by a non-Indigenous composer widely regarded as the most prominent piece of Australian classical music composed before the 1960s. In the historiography of Australian music that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, Antill’s work occupied a foundational position as the moment when Australian composition purportedly caught up with developments in international musical modernism. The reception history demonstrates, however, that Corroboree was rarely described in reviews as “modern,” “contemporary,” or “new,” especially in the two decades after its 1946 premiere. I argue that Corroboree’s positioning as Australia’s attainment of musical modernity was a retrospective interpretation by modernist writers associated with the compositional “new wave” of the 1960s and reflected their rethinking of Australian music history as a modernist teleology. In both international and Australian reviews, responses most frequently reference tropes and concepts associated with primitivism and exoticism. Primitivist language occurs throughout the whole course of the work’s reception, whereas exoticizing terms such as “weird” and “bizarre” are more frequent in the early years, before its modernist reinterpretation. Importantly, this early reception corresponds with recent analyses of Antill’s compositional aims and Nicholas Thomas’s notion of settler primitivism. Thomas described a type of primitivism broadly distinct from modernist primitivism’s aesthetics of formal innovation, cultural renewal, and emulation of the “primitive.” Settler primitivism is instead a type of representation and identity-work in settler societies based on the nationalist desire of settler artists to create a sense of belonging through identification with local Indigenous cultures. In the case of Corroboree, as understandings of the work in exoticist terms waned, the reception shifted and its primitivism tended to be framed in relation to modernism’s concern with stylistic innovation and formalism.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83454563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melodia and the “Disposition of the Soul”","authors":"David E. Cohen","doi":"10.1525/jm.2022.39.2.179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.2.179","url":null,"abstract":"In 1607 Claudio Monteverdi’s younger brother, Giulio Cesare, published his Dichiaratione, arguably the most significant document of the famous and influential polemic known as the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy. He there attempted to rebut Giovanni Maria Artusi’s criticism of the technical “licenses”—especially with regard to dissonance treatment—that the great composer had sought to justify as essential elements of the new approach to text setting that he called the seconda pratica. In support of his argument, Giulio Cesare quotes passages from Plato’s Republic in order to claim the great philosopher’s authority for his brother’s revolutionary musical poetics. As I show in this study, the Platonic pronouncements concerning what the Monteverdis call melodia, that is, song (melos), provide Giulio Cesare with virtually the whole of his implicit argument for the artistic validity of Claudio’s subversive compositional practices. The article’s principal aim, however, is to demonstrate that Giulio Cesare exploits a lexical peculiarity in Ficino’s Latin translation of the Republic to misrepresent Plato’s thought on a point of great importance to the philosopher: the power of song to influence a people’s ēthos, their ethical or moral character. Ficino’s idiosyncratic rendering in the crucial passage of ēthos tēs psychēs as affectio animi (“affection of the soul”) enables, and indeed invites, Giulio Cesare to elide the true object of Plato’s concern and instead implicitly associate the philosopher’s dicta regarding the ethical force of melos with what the Dichiaratione identifies as the goal of the seconda pratica: “moving the affections of the soul.”","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"90 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83922030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Free Jazz and the “New Thing”","authors":"Kwami Coleman","doi":"10.1525/jm.2021.38.3.261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2021.38.3.261","url":null,"abstract":"Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79865617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}