Texture and Sonata Form in Classical String Quartets: A Corpus Study

The corpus study reported by De Souza, Dvorsky, and Oyon (2024) investigates texture in sonata form movements of classical string quartets (by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven) using onset synchrony. The following commentary provides some additional discussion on the behavior of various measures of onset synchrony when applied to this genre, and the potential of this research to be more widely generalizable.

Reviewed by: Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna by Nancy November Elizabeth Kramer Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna. By Nancy November. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2017. [x, 258 p. ISBN 9781783272327 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787440739 (e-book), $24.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna by Nancy November is worth serious consideration by individuals who love and think deeply about music as historical and cultural phenomena and by libraries serving such patrons. In a clear, sophisticated, and carefully crafted narrative, the book takes on three paradigms that November argues have distorted our understandings of the genre: the "near-exclusive focus" on Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven; the overlooking of other composers' music—except perhaps for their string quartets—and then judging them by narrow aesthetic ideals; and the presentation of instrumental chamber music as "'au tonomous,' cut off from social situations and meanings" (p. 2). The challenge of responding to such familiar tropes is in confronting audiences and writers who have been more or less accepting of the general narrative for the past century. Her account, which unfolds through eight chapters and an epilogue, involves critiquing wider concepts of "public" and "private" and of Beethoven's place in the history. She also mines period definitions of chamber music to engage readers in a story of "culturally determined" ideals being "radically renegotiated" (p. 5). These ambitions noted, November launches into chapter 1 and a definition of chamber music in the early nineteenth century with foci on genre, [End Page 271] the dominance of the string quartet, and masculine music making. Along the way, she contrasts history's subsequent generic focus on chamber music instrumentation with the performance parameters that originally defined the genre and, in the process, looks at early nineteenth-century visual metaphors for chamber music and addresses the category of class. The chapter concludes with a subsection in which she engages Wilhelm Windelband's "idiographic" approach, which Eduard Hanslick adopted as he worked toward what he called "eine lebendige Geschichte des neueren Wiener Konzertwesens" (a living history of Viennese concert life; p. 20). She freely reformulates—"following Hanslick's methodology in spirit, although not to the letter" (p. 22)—his path into a twenty-first-century approach of "snapshots and statistics" (p. 20), the latter of which she further nuances as "'sampling,' taking snapshots, or cutting cross-sections" (p. 21). This is perhaps the first major example of her creative approach of seeking life in historical constructs from looking at the past through a historicist's lens. Embarking on her first snapshots in chapter 2, "Celebrating Haydn, Cultivating Opera," November discusses the influence of Haydn, vocal music, and the theater in Beethoven's Vienna, and she surveys the careers of Paul Wranitzky, Emanuel Aloys Förster, and Adalbert Gyrowetz, drawing on her scholarly expertise in these areas. She seizes this opportunity to discuss musical markets, compositional careers, and the generally "outward-looking character" of Viennese chamber music and stresses that ideals such as homogeneity or "purity" were "not yet shaping aesthetics of chamber music" (p. 59). The third chapter, "Selling String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna," features short subsections containing her analysis of publishing catalogs from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, which provide a nice contrast to the expository detail of the previous chapter. Her chapter conclusion again engages larger themes: the role of publishers in selling "stability" and "sociability"— themes that will reappear later in the book—and an acknowledgment that string quartets in Vienna around 1800 have perhaps been overemphasized. Her energetic dedication to a close historical reading of chamber music through the book makes this latter point hard not to accept even by readers who might have been guilty of a more complacent approach to the genre. Chapter 4, "Locating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna," paints a cultural landscape of early nineteenth-century Viennese quartet "homes," from music making in actual homes and salons to public concerts and the emergence of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. In her sketch, she makes copious reference to primary sources (including those outside of music) and secondary source citations. (For example, she expands on her reference...

Despite the recent growth of Formenlehre research and pedagogy, the repertoire of sonata form pedagogy remains impoverished: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote an astonishing 84% of sonata form examples in three current leading textbooks, suggesting that students only learn the sonata form practices of three White male composers from Germany and Austria, all writing music around the same time. Yet this consistency comes at a cost. Poundie Burstein has noted that focusing on too few composers distorts one’s understanding of history and style. Furthermore, only studying the works of cisgendered White men continues to reify what Philip Ewell has called music theory’s “White racial frame.” To tie both points together, whose norms are we teaching and why? Our chapter responds to these problems with a two-week unit on sonata form that focuses on works by a more diverse set of composers: Guadeloupe-born French composer Joseph Bologne (1745-1799), Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), and African American composer Florence Price (1887-1953). The unit comprises a flexible set of four lesson plans that can be implemented directly as a sonata form unit within an undergraduate core theory course or graduate review.

Importance. The range of issues of fortepiano pedagogy related to the development of the classical sonata form in succession with the composing and performing experience of the pre-classical period is considered. The problem of mastering the modern musical and pedagogical experience in the field of studying the classical sonata form in the fortepiano classroom is solved. Materials and methods. The semiotic approach to the musical text is used as the main methodological principle, as well as historical and cultural commentary and reconstruction of the authentic environment in which the classical sonata form was created and developed. The expediency of using the “quasi-score of the performing concept” in pedagogical communication is shown. The justification of the introduced concept contains various examples of reading the urtext. The proposed methods can be widely used in the sequential process of mastering a large form in an instrumental classroom. Results and Discussion. A useful result of the proposed approach is a meaningful attitude to performance technique as a resource for generating variants of the correct author’s interpretation of a work of art. Despite the fact that the large form is an obligatory part of music pedagogy, practicing musicians face problems of formal and semantic perception of the text in the process of participating in the dialogue environment “teacher – student”, “composer – instrumentalist”. By analogy with the term quasi-scores used in the art criticism analysis of a large form, the concept of “quasi-score of the performing concept” is introduced, which allows to enrich pedagogical communication with a large volume of historical and cultural information tied to the artistic text of the work and the technology of its performance. Concrete examples of the mutual influence of the largest representatives of the composer and performing practice of the 18th century are given and interpreted. Conclusion. The idea of the need to develop the ability of an instrumentalist to understand, hear and reproduce in performing practice the constructs of the musical language generated in the syncretism of the compositional and performing practice of the epochs of Johann Kunau, the Bach family, Domenico Scarlatti, Georg Friedrich Handel, Joseph Haydn, Muzio Clementi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven is argued.

During the second half of the eighteenth century in Europe a remarkable change occurred in the evaluation and understanding of music. From being widely regarded as something to be used to accompany social and religious occasions, rather than be listened to and played for its own sake, music came to be regarded by some influential writers, philosophers and composers as the source of revelations that were inaccessible to any other form of human expression. This change in the reception of music paralleled the remarkable flowering in the production of music in Germany from the later eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century in the work of, among others, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. The status of music in this period is connected to new interpretations of language and subjectivity associated with Romanticism, and these interpretations affect many widely held theoretical assumptions. Philosophical accounts of music still, for example, tend to assume that music is a mystery which needs to be explained in a philosophical theory. However, conceptual and aesthetic developments associated with Romanticism already put this assumption into question, because it depends on the idea that the primary function of language is to represent the objective world.

Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Mozart's and Symphonies Arranged for Pianoforte, Flute, Violin, and Violoncello. Edited by Mark Kroll. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 29.) Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2000. [Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii-xvi; 2 plates; scores, 114 p.; crit. report, p. 115-17. ISBN 0-89579-466-7. $55; parts (fl., vln., vc.), $27.] Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Twelve Select Overtures Arranged for Pianoforte, Flute, Violin, and Violoncello. Edited by Mark Kroll. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 35.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2003. [Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii-xii; 2 plates; scores, 285 p.; crit. report, p. 287-89. ISBN 0-89579-519-1. $160; parts (fl., vln., vc.), $54.] Contains overtures to Prometheus (Beethoven), Die Zauberflote (Mozart), Lodoiska (Cherubini), Figaro (Mozart), Iphigenia [en Aulide] (Gluck), Sargino (Ferdinando Paer), Der Freischutz (Weber), Euryanthe (Weber), Tancredi (Rossini), and Anacreon (Cherubini), plus Original Overture (Friedrich Heinrich Himmel) and [Original] Overture (Andreas Jakob Romberg). On the face of it, a critical edition of an version of a musical work, and of an arrangement no less, would seem to be a misdirection of scholarly effort, particularly when the work in question is very familiar and readily available, both in print and in recorded performances, in its authentic form. But there are many valid reasons for taking such arrangements and inauthentic editions seriously, and we can therefore extend a warm welcome to these two volumes edited by Mark Kroll in Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries that present Johann Nepomuk Hummel's arrangements of two Mozart symphonies (from Mozart's Six Grand Symphonies [London: Chappell & Co., 1823-24]) and a dozen overtures by various composers that comprised his first set of Twelve Select Overtures (London: Boosey, 1821). As Kroll details in his valuable introduction to the Mozart volume (see table 1, pp. xi-xii), Hummel produced a substantial catalog of such arrangements in the 1820s and 1830s. In addition to the works at hand, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Haffner and Linz Symphonies, K. 385 and 425, these include another dozen overtures, Ludwig van Beethoven's Septet, Fidelia (for piano four-hands), and his first seven symphonies, four symphonies by Joseph Haydn (nos. 44, 100, 102, and 103), a symphony by Andreas Jakob Romberg, and the balance of Mozart's last six symphonies and seven of his piano concertos. This last group is especially notable for Hummel's original cadenzas and for his lavish embellishments to both slow and fast movements, designed to exploit the expanded range of the nineteenth-century piano. Until recently, Hummel's cadenzas could still be heard from time to time. The old Schirmer two-piano edition of the DMinor Concerto, K. 466, edited by Franz Kullak (Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics, 661 [1901, 1929; reprint, 2002]), printed Hummel's cadenzas in the body of the score while relegating Beethoven's to an appendix. Even Glenn Gould, who was quite capable of fashioning brilliant cadenzas of his own, as we know from his incomparable recording of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, chose Hummel's firstmovement cadenza when he recorded Mozart's C-Minor Concerto, K. 491 (Beethoven: Columbia Symphony Orchestra/ Vladimir Golschmann, (Columbia MS 6017 [1958], LP, with various reissues including Beethoven, The 5 Piano Concertos, Sony Classical SM3K 52632 [1992], CD); Mozart: CBC Symphony/Walter Susskind, Columbia MS 6339 [1962], LP, in various reissues including Sony Classical SMK 52626 [1992], CD). And should some venturesome pianists feel the urge to go it alone in Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos, K. 365, they should be aware that Hummel's arrangement awaits their perusal. The titles of Hummel's arrangements, as given on the title pages of the new editions -arranged for pianoforte, flute, violin, and violoncello-do not fully represent these versions, as they might more accurately be designated for piano solo or piano with the accompaniment of flute, violin, and cello. …

Relationships between classical music composers are known due to explicit historic material, for instance the friendship between Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as the influence of the latter on Ludwig van Beethoven. While Haydn and Mozart were critics of each others work, Mozart and Beethoven probably never met in person. In spite of that there is an impact on especially the early music of Beethoven. While relationships between well-known composers like the mentioned ones are investigated, it can also be of historic interest to know the roles less-known composers played. Some of them might have a part in a famous persons work but were not further analyzed given the fact that there have been many composers and no hints given to researchers indicating which person would be worth studying. In this work we develop an approach to visually hint possible relationships among a large number of composers. Detailed historic knowledge is not taken into account; the hints are only based on the composer works as well as their lifetimes in order to guess directions of influence.

This article concerns the String Quartets of Erik Tulindberg (1761–1814), who was the first known Finnish composer. Tulindberg was musically active primarily in the late 1770s and early 1780s, when he was studying at the Royal Academy of Turku (Kunglika Akademien i Åbo). He was respected as a skilful violinist and a chamber musician, playing in the Academy’s orchestra on ceremonial occasions and giving public concerts. Tulindberg’s compositional oeuvre comprises two Violin Concertos, six String Quartets and a few works for solo violin. The corpus of Tulindberg’s String Quartets is approached from two perspectives, namely conventional strategies of the Classical style on one hand, and Tulindberg’s recurrent choices as attributes of his personal musical language on the other. Widely used analytical tools are applied in studying the corpus, and the Quartets are compared with certain works that originate in the same period and reside in Tulindberg’s archive. The theoretical framework includes writings that focus specifically on describing the compositional strategies used in Classical and Pre-Classical music, the authors including James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Graham Hunt, William Caplin, Poundie Burstein and Danuta Mirka, among others. The discussion covers 1) the overall structure, the key design and cadences in the opening movements, all of which are in sonata form; 2) the essential harmonic traits; and 3) surface characteristics and expressive means such as topics, melodic figuration and instrumental writing. The analysis reveals that Tulindberg adopted the commonly used strategies and main expressive means of the Classical style. The attributes of his musical language include traits such as the constant use of extended modal mixture, enthusiasm for a varied rondo-form and frequent violoncello solos in the upper register. Although the String Quartets are conventional in structure, each one is individual in its construction. The stylistic correspondence between the works and those of composers such as Joseph Haydn, Luigi Boccherini and Ignace Pleyel, shows his thorough understanding of the music written by his contemporaries.

In spite of the fast pace at which electronic information is now speeding around the globe, the pace of the release of commercially viable interactive multimedia products in the field of music has been relatively slow. Hypercard, the application that was used for the first generation of these products, was first released in 1988, but today the choice of CD-ROMs remains limited. Of the available titles, jazz and popular music are proportionately better represented than classical music. One welcomes, therefore, Russell Steinberg's Richard Strauss.' Three Tone Poems, first released by Voyager in 1992 and licensed to Microsoft in 1994. three tone poems on the CD are Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Death and Transfiguration, as performed by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Lorin Maazel. In authoring this multimedia product, Steinberg faced the inevitable comparisons between his work and that of his colleague at UCLA, Robert Winter. Winter is the pioneer in this area, having published for Voyager: Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 (1989), Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1990), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's String Quartet in C Major, K. 465 (1991) [reviewed below], and Antonin Dvorak's Symphony no. 9 (1994). Like Winter's work, Steinberg's CD-ROM sets a full musical rendering of a masterwork (or works, in this case) by a world-class orchestra within an instructional context composed of narrative/descriptive text, definitions of musical terms, and historical, biographical and orchestrational information, all of which is integrated and interactive for the user. It would be fair to say that Steinberg has measured up to Winter's high standard and has produced a useful and attractive product. principal distinction between the two versions of the Three Tone Poems is in the interface. earlier Macintosh version from Voyager makes an attempt to integrate and music, thus exploiting the visual dimension of the medium. effort deserves a salute, even if the result is disappointing. designer elected to adopt an imitation Aubrey Beardsley-art nouveau style of illustration, which does vaguely evoke Beardsley's gloriously wicked Salome illustrations, and is thus both pleasantly erotic and historically appropriate. Technically it even suits the purely black-and-white color scheme. But ultimately the execution of the is so poor that it falls far short of giving the program real visual appeal. illustrations turn out to be embarrassingly cartoonish, with the depiction of Till Eulenspiegel's antics on the gallows being one particularly bad example. In this Macintosh version the user is given the option, blessedly removed in the PC version, of viewing the art rather than reading the accompanying textual explication during the playthrough of the music. To choose this option is certainly to lessen the instructional impact; indeed, one is tempted to say, it is to vulgarize the experience of the music. In the newer Microsoft version of the product, the artwork in general has become neutral and abstract, and there is no apparent aim to integrate and music stylistically. This removes the possibility of the being a distraction, but it also means that the visual potential of the medium has not been utilized beyond mere marginal illustration. Other aspects of the interface need no specific commentary, apart from the assurance that navigation is easy and the many visual cues provide a user-friendly environment. One useful feature added in the Microsoft version is an aural rendering of glossary terms, which one accesses by clicking on a speaker icon. core content of the two versions is essentially the same, although a number of errors or infelicities in Voyager's Macintosh version have been cleaned up for the later Microsoft version. basic program consists of nine main sections, presented in typical menu style on the opening screen. These sections are the Pocket Guide, Close Reading, Master Orchestrator, Inside the Score, The Tone Poem, Pragmatic Romantic, Further Reading, Glossary, and Prankster's Game. …

The paper focuses on the function of recapitulation in the sonata form relying on the example of the first movements of Beethoven's string quartets Op. 18 No. 1–6. With regard to the fact that recapitulation is commonly described as a restatement of the exposition with tonal alterations of the second theme and the closing section, analytical deliberations most often do not go beyond recording such alterations. However, some analysis point to the new role of the recapitulation exactly on account of the essence of the undertaken alterations, i.e. on account of the idea that the composer wants to accomplish at the level of sonata form through recapitulation. The research is conceived as a continuation of the previous studies (Zdravić Mihailović 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2015a, 2015b). These studies focused on the genre of string quartet of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, where recapitulation was proven to be a remarkable phenomenon as its role was not merely to restate the exposition’s content with the usual tonal alterations. On the contrary, it can be a place of a new treatment of the sections of the exposition, and gives it some completely specific features.

Reprise Structures in Haydn’s Op. 50 Minuets Samantha M. Inman (bio) Over-enthusiasm for the epic too easily directs admiration away from the skills needed to create a miniature masterpiece.1 A minuet, with respect to execution, is no different from a concerto, an aria, or a symphony,” Joseph Riepel asserts.2 Indeed, the first two chapters of his Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst demonstrate how aspects of phrase structure and motivic development apply to genres ranging from the humble to the prestigious. This approach to composition pedagogy highlights the need for basic skills that can be honed in small-scale works and applied to large-scale works. Conversely, creative manipulations typically associated with large forms may be used to enliven small forms. This principle is evident in the minuets by Joseph Haydn. Early biographer G. A. Griesinger hints at the value the composer placed on the minuet in the following anecdote: “Someone told Haydn that Albrechtsberger wished to see all fourths banished from the purest style. ‘What does that mean?’ replied Haydn…. ‘Such affectations [End Page 23] are worthless. I would rather someone tried to compose a really new minuet.’”3 Haydn’s own minuets encompass sophisticated compositional techniques, attesting to his own search for new ways of writing in familiar genres. Past studies of Haydn’s minuets in string quartets or symphonies have employed analytic tools such as hypermeter and topic theory.4 However, even fundamental aspects of tonality and form in these dances can reward close examination. This case study considers Haydn’s Op. 50 string quartets for four reasons. First, extant literature acknowledges the complexity of Haydn’s quartet movements in general and the quartet minuet movements in particular.5 Second, focusing on a single opus highlights the variety in pieces composed within a short time span. Written for Friedrich [End Page 24] Wilhelm II from Prussia, all six of these quartets were completed and published in 1787.6 Third, outside of W. Dean Sutcliffe’s excellent monograph on the set, Op. 50 has received less scholarly attention than Haydn’s other groups of string quartets, especially Opp. 20, 33, and 76.7 Fourth, and most importantly, the minuets of Op. 50 provide a particularly fertile field for studying reprise structures. As Sutcliffe notes, “the third movements of Op. 50 … are concerned with matters of dominant preparation and structural return, almost to the point of being a fetish.”8 The present article views the minuet and trio movements from Haydn’s Op. 50 string quartets through the lenses of form and Schenkerian voice leading.9 After a brief overview of the set, analyses of the individual dances are presented in three groups in order of increasing complexity. Just as Haydn’s sonata movements range from textbook to deformational, the minuets in Op. 50 range from conventional to peculiar.10 In fact, the manner in which the minuets depart from expectations reflects features well-documented in his movements in sonata form, including unusual starts to reprises, rewritten recapitulations, and cross-references with material from the digression.11 [End Page 25] Minuets and Trios in Haydn’s Op. 50: An Overview All six minuet and trio movements in Haydn’s Op. 50 follow the conventional compound ternary form encompassing two binary forms. Furthermore, each nested binary form is at least arguably rounded, featuring a reprise.12 The harmonic ending to the first part of a binary form determines the extent to which modifications must be made in a reprise. As Table 1 shows, Op. 50 contains representatives of two different types: sectional and continuous. Sectional forms, which close their first section with an authentic cadence in the tonic key, require no alteration; repetition of the entire passage at the end of the second section yields satisfactory closure. In contrast, continuous forms require modification in order to reach tonal closure, altering a half cadence to an authentic cadence or rewriting a modulating first section to conclude in tonic. Despite the different tendencies of sectional and continuous forms, Haydn’s Op. 50 contains instances of minimal and radical alterations in both categories, as Table 1 indicates.13 While five out of the [End Page 26] Click for larger view...

The conception of sonata form as expounded by Charles Rosen has proved enormously useful for understanding music of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this view, a sonata movement is a dramatization of fundamental tonal and motivic processes; to analyze sonata form is to uncover the expressive aspirations of a composer, even of an age. Neither a single formal structure nor a simple principle or device, Classical sonata form is central to the personal styles of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Hence it is almost a contradiction in terms to speak of the same form in music of other composers, particularly an earlier one such as Bach, whose preludes and fugues are in some ways the antithesis of a Classical sonata movement.

Reviewed by: 6 String Quartets, Opus 20, Hoboken III: 31-36, and: 6 String Quartets, Opus 33, Hoboken III: 37-42, and: 6 String Quartets, Opus 50, Hoboken III: 44-49, and: Streichquartette "Opus 76", "Opus 77" und "Opus 103" W. Dean Sutcliffe Joseph Haydn. 6 String Quartets, Opus 20, Hoboken III: 31–36. Edited by Simon Rowland-Jones; editorial consultant, David Ledbetter. Urtext. London: Edition Peters, c2001. [1 plate; pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. v–xv; explanation of terms, p. xvi–xvii; references, p. xviii; score, 88 p.; crit. commentary, p. 89–101; and 4 parts. ISMN M-57708-356-8; ISBN 1-901507-21-1; Edition Peters no. 7594. $55.] Joseph Haydn. 6 String Quartets, Opus 33, Hoboken III: 37–42. Edited by Simon Rowland-Jones; editorial consultant, David Ledbetter. London: Edition Peters, c2002. [1 plate; pref., references in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. v–xxii; score, 78 p.; crit. commentary, p. 79–90; and 4 parts. ISMN M-57708-357-5; ISBN 1-901507-22-X; Edition Peters no. 7595. $55.] Joseph Haydn. 6 String Quartets, Opus 50, Hoboken III: 44–49. Edited by Simon Rowland-Jones; editorial consultant, David Ledbetter. Urtext. London: Edition Peters, c2003. [1 plate; pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. v–xxiv; references, p. xxv; opening dynamics, p. xxvi; score, 98 p.; crit. commentary, p. 99–110; and 4 parts. ISMN M-57708-463-3; Edition Peters no. 7615. $55.] Joseph Haydn. Streichquartette “Opus 76,” “Opus 77” und “Opus 103.” Herausgegeben von Horst Walter mit Vorarbeiten von Lars Schmidt-Thieme. (Joseph Haydn Werke, ser. 12, vol. 6.) Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2003. [Frontispiece (2 MS leaves from op. 103); Vorwort, p. vii–xvi; Zur Gestaltung der Ausgabe, p. xvii; score, p. 3–166; Anhang, p. 167–74; Krit. Bericht, p. 175–227. Cloth: HN 5342, €165; paper: HN 5341, €156.] Although this is not spelled out by means of a general series preface, the new Peters editions of Joseph Haydn's opus 20, 33, and 50 string quartets are meant above all for the performer. Yet whereas such performing editions of old took for granted their right to alter and add to previous texts without troubling the player, times have changed, and editor Simon Rowland-Jones shows far greater care. Thus while his brief is clearly to offer explicit and full indications for the practicing musician, he also presents an extensive critical commentary for these quartets that tracks most of the editorial decisions based on the sources at hand. Editorial brackets generally appear only when dynamic levels are suggested at the start of a movement. In most other circumstances a novel system of six numerical categories alerts players to editorial intervention by placing numbers at the relevant spots in the score (and, importantly, in the individual parts). Separate listings in each movement's critical report then elucidate these emendations by dividing them into categories of general (covering such matters [End Page 486] as varying tempo indications and fingerings), variants of pitch and duration, slurs and ties, staccato marks, ornaments, and dynamics. One can only applaud any attempt to make the details of the editorial process more approachable and to tempt players into consulting the back pages. Even reputable ensembles may still be playing from comfortable older editions despite the availability of several better, more recent alternatives. There are the editions by Reginald Barrett-Ayres and H. C. Robbins Landon published by Doblinger (op. 20: Diletto musicale, 722–27 [Vienna, 1981–87; reissued as set, 1995, Diletto musicale, 988]; op. 33: Diletto musicale, 728–33 [1988; reissued as set, 1995, Diletto musicale, 989]; op. 50: Diletto musicale, 735–40 [1985; reissued as set, 1989, Diletto musicale, 990]), likewise available as scores and parts; and for opus 20 and 33, there is, supremely, the edition in the Joseph Haydn Werke edited by Georg Feder and Sonja Gerlach (ser. 12, vol. 3 [Munich: G. Henle, 1974]), but performance parts remain unavailable. In the case of opus 50, however, we still await the verdict from the Werke; when published, the volume covering opus 42, 50, 54, and 55 will conclude the series of quartets in the complete edition. While the Doblinger edition of opus 50 was able...

The musical analysis of large-scale structures, such as the classical sonata form, requires to integrate multiple analyses of local musical events into a global coherent analysis. Modelling large-scale structures is still a challenging task for the research community. It includes building large and accurate annotated corpora, as well as developing practical and efficient tools in order to visualize the analyses of these corpora. It finally requires the conception of effective and properly evaluated MIR algorithms. We propose a machine learning approach for the sonata form structure on 32 movements from Mozart’s string quartets. We release an open dataset, encoding two reference analyses of these 32 movements, totaling more than 1800 curated annotations, as well as flexible visualizations of these analyses. We discuss the occurrence in this corpus of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic features induced by pitches, durations, and rests. We investigate whether the presence or the absence of these features can be characteristic of the different sections forming a sonata form. We then compute the emission and transition probabilities of several Hidden Markov Models intended to match the structure of sonata forms at several resolutions. Our results confirm that the sonata form is better identified when the parameters are learned rather than manually set up. These results open perspectives on the computational analysis of musical forms by mixing human knowledge and machine learning from annotated scores.

William B. Bradbury. Esther, the Beautiful Queen. Edited byjuanita Karpf. (Recent Researches in American Music, 38.) Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2000. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xix; text, p. xx-xxv; 4 plates; personations (cast), p. 2; vocal score, p. 3-117; crit. report, p. 119-22. ISBN 0-89579-465-9. $55.] George Frederick Bristow. The Oratorio of Daniel, Opus 42. Edited by David Griggs-Janower. (Recent Researches in American Music, 34.) Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c!999. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xiv; text, p. xv-xviii; cast and instruments, p. 2; score, p. 3-440; crit. report, p. 441-44. ISBN 0-89579-443-8. $145.] The oratorio in America has been gradually rediscovered in the past quartercentury, thanks largely to the pioneering work of the late Thurston J. Dox, whose American Oratorios and Cantatas: A Catalog of Works Written in the United Stales from Colonial Times to 1985 (2 vols. [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1986]) lists over 3,400 such works. Many of these-and particularly those written before the generation of Dudley Buck (1839-1909) and John Knowles Paine (1839-1906)-had been unknown or forgotten, and Dox was indefatigable in encouraging musicologists and conductors to resurrect them. Both of the works treated in this review are listed in Dox's catalog, and their publication by A-R Editions in Recent Researches in American Music contributes a significant addition to our firsthand knowledge of this long-neglected repertory. William Batchelder Bradbury (1816-1868) was one of a group of populisLs gathered around Lowell Mason (1792-1872) that included George Frederick Root (1820-1895), Isaac Baker Woodbury (1819-1858), and others. These men were committed to improving America's social and moral life through music, which in turn required literacy and community music making. They sought to raise the level of knowledge and ability through choral concerts and normal institutes (to train music teachers), and through publishing correct and elevating music. While Mason confined his compositions largely to hymn tunes and elementary school songs, his followers branched out to parlor songs, cantatas, and oratorios, and even instrumental music. The oblong tunebook was the preferred format; it could be produced and sold inexpensively (and profitably) for use at the compiler's musical conventions. These tunebooks proved an effective way to disseminate the larger choral forms; in them, Root, Woodbury, and Bradbury published pasticcio oratorios and cantatas that borrowed from such sources as Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, and the popular Italian and French operas of the era. In fact, in both Boston and London in the 183Os and 184Os, concerts of assorted choral music were often called oratorios. Esther is the only large-scale work for which Bradbury composed all of the music. In her introduction to this edition, Juanita Karpf, citing the oratorio's reputed number of sales and reprints, calls it arguably, the most popular large-scale choral work written by an American composer during the nineteenth century (p. ix). Bradbury composed Esther in August 1856 on a libretto by Chauncey M. Cady, who is best remembered as a partner in the firm of Root and Cady, music publishers in Chicago from 1858 to 1872. Cady's text draws heavily on the biblical book oi'Esther, with additions from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and the Psalms. The whole is divided into two parts, the first with fourteen numbers and the second with fifteen. Narration is provided, not by recitatives, but by a reader. Ten roles are assigned to soloists, and these interact with varying choral forces. Accompaniment is provided by a keyboard instrument, and Karpf has capably and helpfully completed the accompaniments left incomplete by Bradbury. She also cites a New Orleans performance in 1859 accompanied by a piano, melodeon, and string quartet, showing that contemporaries clearly felt free to add instruments as available. …