{"title":"Out of Proportion","authors":"Emily Zazulia","doi":"10.1525/JM.2019.36.2.131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2019.36.2.131","url":null,"abstract":"Guillaume Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores (1436) has been subject to symbolic interpretation ever since Charles Warren suggested that the structure of the motet reflects the architectural proportions of the cathedral of Florence. More recent analyses have accepted the premise that the motet’s form has extramusical meaning, in particular, that mensural and architectural proportions can be directly analogized. These tantalizing connections have led scholars to canonize this motet, now a mainstay of music history textbooks. The extent and specificity of the extramusical associations Nuper rosarum flores enjoys—an occasion, a place, and a secure attribution—are rare in the fifteenth century. This fact alone makes the motet appear to be exceptional. But reading Nuper rosarum flores alongside the norms of genre and notation and against the grain of the work’s modern historiography suggests that it isn’t all that special—or at least that it is no more special than Du Fay’s other ceremonial motets. The interpretive history of Nuper rosarum flores exemplifies what I call “false exceptionalism,” which relates to a more general problem in music studies—the alluring but often elusive relationship between musical form and social meaning.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89722790","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":"Chaikovsky and the Economics of Art Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia","authors":"P. Bullock","doi":"10.1525/JM.2019.36.2.195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2019.36.2.195","url":null,"abstract":"As Russia’s first professional, conservatory-trained composer, Petr Il'ich Chaikovsky operated in the rapidly evolving social and economic context of post-emancipation Russia, identifying ways to interact with Russia’s musical institutions—its opera houses and theaters, its concert organizations and publishers—to fashion a career that was as successful financially as it was critically. Yet the myth of Chaikovsky’s financial incompetence persists, and the image, whether popular or scholarly, is still one of Chaikovsky as a spendthrift, unable to manage his income or regulate his outgoings. This article challenges such views by drawing on the recently published complete correspondence between Chaikovsky and his publisher, Petr Iurgenson, as well as on financial records preserved in the composer’s archives. In particular, this article analyzes the relationship among Chaikovsky, Iurgenson, and the operation of Russia’s musical “marketplace” at the level of genre, examining the interaction between financial considerations on the one hand and Chaikovsky’s decision to work in particular musical forms on the other. By examining the connections among Russia’s nascent musical institutions, Chaikovsky’s particular collaboration with his publisher, and the relative status of different musical genres, it becomes possible to establish the nature of Russia’s musical “art world” in the second half of the nineteenth century. In proposing a more nuanced and systematic account of Chaikovsky’s economic agency than has been attempted previously, this article thus contributes to a growing body of work on the institutional structures that shaped the Russian arts in the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77013103","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":"Music in Balance","authors":"Matthew Pritchard","doi":"10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.39","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that musicological interpretations of Immanuel Kant’s music aesthetics tend to misread his stance as a defense of artistic formalism and autonomy—traits that, although present in his account of music, in fact reinforce his peculiarly low estimate of music’s value among the fine arts. Kant's position and its subsequent influence can be grasped more securely by analyzing his dichotomy between “free” and “dependent” beauty. Through an exploration of this opposition’s echoes and applications in the thought of three “Kantian” music critics and aestheticians in the two decades after the appearance of the Critique of Judgement—J. F. Reichardt, an anonymous series of articles commonly attributed to J. K. F. Triest, and C. F. Michaelis—this essay argues that Kantian aesthetics as applied in practice involved close attention to the impact of genre, style, function, and compositional aims on the relevant standards of judgment for an individual musical work. The result was not one-sided support for the aesthetic or metaphysical “truth” of absolute music, but a characteristic balance between the claims of “pure” and “applied” art forms—a balance that continued to be maintained in the transition from classical to Romantic aesthetics in the first decade of the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72748924","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":"Galina Ustvolskaya Outside, Inside, and Beyond Music History","authors":"Simon A. Morrison","doi":"10.1525/jm.2019.36.1.96","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2019.36.1.96","url":null,"abstract":"Even among devotees of her music, Galina Ustvolskaya is often reduced to an intersectional victim of gendered and political repression, a fearful casualty of the Soviet system. Her percussive scores, including the Sixth Piano Sonata, have earned Ustvolskaya the nickname “lady with the hammers.” This article reviews the literature about this composer alongside scores from the beginning, middle, and end of her career, asking: Should her life and work be considered from a less empathetic perspective in order to take greater account of her craft, and to avoid the gendered, cultural, and political furrows that would narrow our conception of her music? Instead of defining Ustvolskaya’s life and work against our own expectations, this essay questions our assumptions.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80065655","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":"Comic Irony in Harold en Italie","authors":"Marianna Ritchey","doi":"10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.68","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.68","url":null,"abstract":"Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (1834) is a strange, ambiguously programmatic symphony that refers explicitly to both Beethoven and Byron—two of the lions of Romantic heroism—in ways that are not always straightforward. I argue that Berlioz’s evocation of Romantic heroism is an ironic commentary on the impossibility of artistic freedom in bourgeois society. I also identify a new literary connection to the symphony: the comically ironic short stories and journalism written by Berlioz’s friend Théophile Gautier.\u0000 Many have argued that both the Byronic archetype and the nineteenth-century symphony became vehicles for exploring the high ideal of Romantic heroism. Hearing Harold as humorously ironic enables insights into Berlioz’s experience of his cultural moment and alternative readings of the impact of Byronic and Beethovenian heroism on subsequent generations of artists, while also opening possibilities for exploring narrative as a hermeneutic for musical analysis.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73671702","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":"Ghosting Agrippina","authors":"C. Lanfossi","doi":"10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/JM.2019.36.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers. Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.","PeriodicalId":44168,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88358846","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}