Arnold Dolmetsch Research Articles

Rediscovering Arnold Dolmetsch: going back to the sources of the early music revival

Abstract This article provides a retrospective overview of the discussion of Arnold Dolmetsch, his family, students and friends in Early Music since its first issue in 1973. It connects these cases with a broad range of other literature, suggests the need to rethink and recontextualize the lifetime of Arnold Dolmetsch and considers the significance of archival materials in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection newly available at Cambridge University Library (Ms. Add. 10371). In particular, it demonstrates the largely overlooked intercultural dimension of the Dolmetsch family’s contribution to the early music revival, highlighting their interactions with people and music cultures from beyond western Europe. Finally, it suggests a programme for possible future research on the Dolmetsch phenomenon.

Performing Ornaments in English Harpsichord Music. Part I

The article deals with the problems of interpreting English ornaments (embellishments, graces) of the second half of the 17th century in the process of their evolution. The authors consistently analyze the recommendations of the early English musicians Edward Bevin, Christopher Simpson, Matthew Locke, John Playford, and Henry Purcell. Emphasis in this study is allotted to the first ever published in England full table of ornaments with their execution written by Christopher Simpson in his The Division-Violist (London, 1659). Detailed consideration here is given to the ornament named “Shaked Beat”. It should be noted that the first full table “Marques des Agréments et leur signification” in France was enclosed only in D’Anglebert’s Pièces de Clavecin (c1689). For comparison, recommendations of the performance of ornaments are provided by some Italian, German and French composers and theorists of this time, such as Emilio del Cavalieri, Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, Jean Rousseau, Gilles Jullien, Étienne Loulié and Johann Gottfried Walther. A critical revision of scholarly publications on the problems of this study beginning from Edward Dannreuther and Arnold Dolmetsch to the present time has been carried out. Serious inaccuracies were found in the works of modern researchers and in reference and encyclopedic publications, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Some thoughts on the conventional alteration of rhythm

The article is dedicated to the problem of terminology concerning the main forms of the conventional rhythmic alteration in Baroque and partly Post-Baroque music. Beginning with the study by Arnold Dolmetsch who, in 1915 introduced into scholarly usage the lexeme conventional alteration of rhythm, many authorities have directed their scientific research toward the problem of the specific conventions which existed in rhythmic notation. As a result numerous related musical terms entered the thesaurus of contemporary research: ‘conventional alteration of rhythm’, ‘rhythmic alteration’, ‘notes inegales’, ‘inequality’, ‘overdotting’, ‘unequal’, and the like, which have become abundantly used. However, strict definitions and hierarchies among these terms are lacking in scholarly knowledge. Moreover, until the present day, one may uncover diametrically opposed and controversial interpretations of the basic concepts in the sphere of rhythmic alteration in thematically oriented music publications, reference and encyclopedic literature. The principal disagreements have arisen in connection with the French artistic technique of the notes inegales when a number of authors spread it far beyond the performance practice of French Baroque and Post-Baroque music contrary to, and without justification in, the opinions of early French musicians. This lead to great confusion in early music performance for those musicians who put much effort into their search for historically informed interpretation. The article attempts to reveal the most problematic aspects of modern ideas about the practice of rhythmic alteration in Western European music of the 17th and 18th centuries, and to point to the most characteristic and typological errors in the interpretation of historical sources by contemporary researchers.

Stuart Sillars,Shakespeare and the Victorians.

THE brief to write about Shakespeare and the Victorians, though omitting the Romantics, so that the book’s topics start in 1837, even though it argues that the Victorian age does not really stop before 1914 (185), produces from Stuart Sillars several scholarly chapters. He reviews how Shakespeare was edited and how his plays were commented on; he comments on performance practices; looks at Shakespeare in music, visual art, the novel, and poetry; surveys biographical work on Shakespeare; discusses the influence of ‘Shakespeare’ as a national figure, and has a final chapter called ‘Last Years’ which looks at Shaw, Ellen Terry, Samuel Butler, Sidney Lee, and William Poel, the pages on whom (182–4), including references to the musician Arnold Dolmetsch, Pound’s enthusiasm, are very interesting. All this material, though it does rather assume a progressive view of history, showing Shakespeare as he was received before the more developed twentieth century, when we all know much more, is fairly handled, though there are no footnotes, and very few references in the text. There are just nine pages of ‘Further Reading’ which are useful, but do not really suggest what Professor Sillars has relied upon, and the absence of referencing produces an over-reliance on generalization, as when twice on one page we are told that George Eliot is ‘generally regarded’ (112) as being either this or that, which unfortunately sounds like the non-committal language of Casaubon telling Dorothea about Rome, and also makes Eliot sound like a foreigner to any reader of the book. Similarly, referencing would have avoided the solecism, fortunately rare, as when Wordsworth is said to have revised The Prelude in 1851 (119). But allusions to ‘the Victorian mind’ (50) or to ‘the Victorians’, and what they believed, do not seem to go beyond cliché, unsupported at that, whether describing Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (120) or being embarrassed by Carlyle’s title On Heroes and Hero-Worship (158), where Sillars assumes that Carlyle’s sense of heroism would have accorded with the general estimate and that this needs explaining to modern readers (but it is a more interesting reading to think that Carlyle’s sense is exceptional, and that he knows its use has to be defended, and that it appears in a contestatory mode).

Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar by Ralph Kirkpatrick

AMERICAN MUSIC Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar. By Ralph Kirkpatrick, edited by Meredith Kirkpatrick. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 117.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014. [xv, 186 p. ISBN 9781580465014. $60.] Photographs, appendices, bibliography, discography, index.Meredith Kirkpatrick, the niece of the renowned harpsichordist and musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, has compiled and published over one hundred and twenty letters between her uncle and numerous correspondents, including fellow musicians, patrons, instrument builders, teachers, students, and family members. Most of the letters date from between the early 1930s, when Kirkpatrick was traveling extensively in Europe, and the late 1970s, by which time Kirkpatrick had gone completely blind. These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the personal life of a professional musician-one who, at times, enthused with pleasure about performances or particular works; and at others, demonstrated a testy impatience with builders, teachers, and collaborators. Kirkpatrick's complex relationships make this resource particularly useful for scholars interested in reconstructing the collaborative world of mid-twentieth-century classical music in the United States. While a number of issues in the book's layout, exposition, and organization hinder its ultimate utility, these flaws do not detract from its overall biographical significance.Kirkpatrick's letters provide an array of opinions, recommendations, and criticisms meant for two very different sets of eyes: his family on the one hand, and fellow musicians, patrons, and friends on the other. In the first section-selected letters to his family, most of which date from his early studies in Europe-Kirkpatrick demonstrates youthful enthusiasm, sometimes tinged with the brazenness of a man in his twenties. These letters reveal his admiration for Nadia Boulanger; his unhappiness with his primary harpsichord teacher, Wanda Landowska; and his interactions with other keyboardists such as Arnold Dolmetsch and Paul Brunold. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of these family letters is seeing how Kirkpatrick cultivated and shaped his musical tastes-regarding repertory and technique, especially-during the early part of his life. In a letter from 1931, Kirkpatrick remarks that his teacher, Paul Brunold, knows how to produce a most beautiful tone in a variety and subtlety that Landowska never dreamed of. . . . But on the other hand, he has not her clarity and precision. Oh, for the combination! (p. 18). Here, and elsewhere in his family letters, his fraught and complex relationship with Landowska comes to the fore: he often praises her interpretations of classicalperiod music (as in a letter dated 10 July 1932), and in others, expresses his frustrations with her teaching style, her preference for the Pleyel harpsichords, and her ego (see, for example, letters dated 9 February 1932 and 19 July 1932). These early letters not only reveal what or with whom Kirkpatrick was studying as a young harpsichordist, but also his learning process in developing his own style and approach to both historical and contemporary repertoire. Having been written in Paris, Berlin, and London, they also offer a snapshot of interwar Europe from the perspective of a young American abroad.As a renowned figure in America's early music revival, Ralph Kirkpatrick corresponded with many other established musicians throughout his life. The second section of the book is thus divided by correspondent, and includes letters to and from teachers (including Boulanger and Landowska), patrons (Alexander Mackay-Smith and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge), instrument builders ( John Challis, William Dowd), conductors (Serge Koussevitzky), composers (notably Roger Sessions, Elliott Carter, Vincent Persichetti, and Henry Cowell), critics (Olin Downes), fellow scholar-performers (Kenneth Gilbert), and personal friends (Thornton Wilder). …

In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood by Dorothy de Val (review)

In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood. By Dorothy de Val. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011. [x, 194 p. ISBN 9780754654087. $89.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.This study of Lucy Broadwood (1858- 1929) provides a striking panorama of English musical life in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Great-granddaughter of the founder of the famous piano manufacturing firm, Broadwood was an habitue of the London concert world, privy to trade secrets and insider information about some of Europe's most famous pianists. Membership in genteel society brought regular access to the best musical salons of the capitol, where she witnessed the private performances of many of the foremost musicians of the day. A singer and pianist who also wrote songs, she received much recognition in these circles as a performer and arranger, though upper-class mores that insisted on music as a leisure pursuit ensured that her work in this area be kept to a minimum.Broadwood was also one of the pioneers of the Folk Revival, the movement to collect and codify the artifacts of British traditional culture that had been gathering momentum since the mid-nineteenth century and that culminated in the establishment of the Folk-Lore (1878) and Folk- Song (1899) Societies. She was a founding member of the latter, serving as long-time board member and secretary, and eventually as president. She also edited many issues of the Society's Journal, drawing on her expertise as co-editor, with J. A. Fuller Maitland, of the pathbreaking English County Songs (1893) as well as on her own collecting experiences in the field. Her wide reading in folklore and cultural anthropology brought an unusually keen and sympathetic intelligence to the study of traditional music, while her historical interests extended beyond folk song to include early music. She explored historical methods of performance practice with Arnold Dolmetsch, and published a number of arrangements of early English and continental works in her anthology Old World Songs (1895, also co-edited with Fuller Maitland). At the behest of William Barclay-Squire, Keeper of the Music Collec - tion at the British Museum, she edited songs by Henry Purcell. In the last decade of her life, she contributed to the British ballad opera revival of the 1920s.In short, Broadwood was both witness to and an important player in the musical life of her times. Dorothy de Val has been given the difficult task of conveying the richness of her subject in a mere 164 pages, especially as she has undertaken to write a true biography rather than a more specialized musical monograph. Thus in addition to Broadwood's many important and varied musical pursuits, we learn about her frequent European travels, indifferent health and primitive medical treatments, relationships with family members and the family firm, politics, charity work, and explorations in comparative religion and mysticism. We also encounter her many friends and colleagues, including the pianist Fanny Davies, the baritone James Campbell McInnes (a possible lover), and the civil servant Sir Richmond Ritchie, among others, all of whom receive space and appraisal in relation to Broadwood's life. If some figures and topics are somewhat slighted and the discussion occasionally seems to jump around-an impression not helped by a few chapter subheadings that seem mislabeled or misplaced-this is a perhaps inevitable consequence of Broadwood's relatively low name recognition and the resulting need to keep the book short. Still, as the means by which we get to know her and place her work socially and emotionally, the diversity of topics emerges as a strength. The challenge of being an intelligent and curious single woman in an upper-class Victorian society where marriage was the norm is particularly well drawn, as we see Broadwood chafing under society's strictures, battling depression and struggling internally about missed career opportunities. …

Percy Grainger and the ‘Musical Confucius’

The acquaintance between Arnold Dolmetsch and Percy Grainger spanned the last period of Dolmetsch's life. Grainger's interest in Dolmetsch's work resulted in him becoming active in supporting, assisting and finally—following Dolmetsch's death—bringing to fruition the publication of three viol consorts that Dolmetsch had revived and edited. Drawing particularly on correspondence in the Grainger Museum between Arnold or Mabel Dolmetsch and Grainger, this article includes discussion of Dolmetsch's intentions for publication, his selection of consorts, and Grainger's involvement in the project. The article seeks to shed new light on this part of Grainger's engagement with early music and attempts to illuminate Grainger's comparison of Dolmetsch with Confucius.

Life after death: the viola da gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch

It is normally thought that the bass viol or viola da gamba dropped out of British musical life in the 1690s, and that Henry Purcell was the last composer to write for it. Peter Holman shows how the gamba changed its role and function in the Restoration period under the influence of foreign music and musicians; how it was played and composed for by the circle of immigrant musicians around Handel; how it was part of the fashion for exotic instruments in the middle of the century; and how the presence in London of its greatest eighteenth-century exponent, Charles Frederick Abel, sparked off a revival in the 1760s and 70s. Later chapters investigate the gamba's role as an emblem of sensibility among aristocrats, artists and intellectuals, including the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Edward Walpole, Ann Ford, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gainsborough and Benjamin Franklin, and trace Abel's influence and legacy far into the nineteenth century. A concluding chapter is concerned with its role in the developing early music movement, culminating with Arnold Dolmetsch's first London concerts with old instruments in 1890. PETER HOLMAN is Professor Emeritus of Historical Musicology at Leeds University, and director of The Parley of Instruments, the choir Psalmody, and the Suffolk Villages Festival.

Consort manuscripts catalogued

The revival of English consort music has so far taken about 120 years: in August 1888 Mary Louisa Armitt published her ground-breaking article ‘Old English viol music’ (Quarterly Musical Review, iv (1888), pp.175–192, 243–64), based on research into the Music School Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and about two years later Arnold Dolmetsch began to search the British Museum library for repertory for his viol consort, which made its public debut on 27 April 1891. For most of the 20th century researchers were more or less fully occupied with finding out what there was—hence the Viola da Gamba Society's monumental Thematic index of music for viols, now freely available online (www.vdgs.org.uk/publications-ThematicIndex.html)-and with making an ever-increasing proportion of it available in modern editions. In the last couple of decades attention has turned in earnest to the task of cataloguing and studying the sources in detail, identifying the copyists and investigating their activities—hence the present volume and its predecessor, published in 2001.

Free Online Dictionaries

Free Online Dictionaries Paul Cary For information regarding the scope of this column, consult the headnote in the September 2008 issue (p. 136 of this volume). The dates of access for each review of an online source indicate the dates during which the reviewer was evaluating the resource. All Web sites were last accessed to verify availability on 18 February 2009. Free Online Dictionaries In the age of electronic publishing, many of us have become accustomed to immediate access from anywhere, via computer networks, to authoritative, scholarly resources such as Grove Music Online ( http://oxfordmusiconline.com ) and the Harvard Dictionary of Music (4th ed., 2003 [ http://corp.credoreference.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=121&xrvolid=292 ]). For most of us, our institutions provide this access, it costs us nothing, and we seldom need to think about availability. But what of the researcher or music-lover who is not affiliated with a library that subscribes to such resources? Or what if we are away from home, and access to the scholarly resources for which our institutions pay so much is not available? Thankfully, there is help in such instances, in the form of music dictionaries available for free on the World Wide Web. As one might expect, these resources vary widely in terms of scope, quality, and functionality. This review will evaluate five such sources, concentrating on what might be called terminological dictionaries rather than encyclopedic or biographical sources. Dolmetsch Online Music Dictionary. Dolmetsch Musical Instruments. http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheorydefs.htm (Accessed May-December 2008). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Sound and video adjuncts may require a media player.] The largest of the sources reviewed here, the Dolmetsch Online Music Dictionary (DOMD) defines thousands of terms. Indeed, the number of entries under the letter A alone exceeds one thousand. This large number is accounted for, in part, by the fact that the dictionary does not con-fine itself to the field of music. In addition to specifically musical terms, it defines general words that might appear in printed scores or in writings about music. In French, German, Italian, and Spanish, the selection of words is asserted to be equivalent to “any good pocket dictionary” (Introduction). Specialist terms are also taken from a broad range of related fields, including dance, linguistics, drama, and poetry, to name but a few. The editors intend the dictionary to enable readers to define or translate most terms that they might come across while performing or studying music in major Western languages, and the dictionary seems quite successful in this goal. Although no editors of the dictionary are named on the site, overall responsibility for it seems to lie with Dolmetsch Musical [End Page 808] Instruments, the British firm founded by Arnold Dolmetsch. The dictionary is one of several free resources provided by the Dolmetsch organization. These range from a dictionary of composers (with very brief entries) to fingering charts for the recorder, and ebooks. The editors are careful to lay out the scope and purpose of the dictionary, as noted above. They also explicate their practice regarding names and abbreviations, exhibiting more attention to such details than most similar sources. Perhaps most helpfully, they provide a section of acknowledgments, consisting largely of links (complete with copyright dates and authors) to other online sources that supplement DOMD’s coverage. In some instances, these sites are also the source of DOMD’s own definitions. These are often documented more specifically within the entry by a link pointing to the site from which material was taken. The definitions in DOMD vary quite a bit in terms of length and depth, and because of the derivative nature of many of them, they lack the consistency of approach one might find in a dictionary assembled from whole-cloth. Still, they are generally quite good—concise, yet often multi-faceted, defining a term in several different ways when appropriate. As an example, the definition of “Mode” incorporates the broad concept of a sequence of notes; the more specific meaning as it applies to early Western music; and a brief definition of rhythmic modes. This is supplemented by an illustration (in scale form) of each of...

'Bonnie Sweet Recorder': some issues arising from Arnold Dolmetsch's early English recorder performances

The work of Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) with the recorder was crucial to the subsequent mass revival of the instrument in England. This article discusses in particular two newly discovered recorder programmes of his, dated 1900; it examines the significance of these and some of his later programmes in terms of overall instrumentation and repertory, and questions some long-held beliefs about the nature of Dolmetsch's work with the recorder. The instrument's renaissance in England is placed within its broader musical and cultural context. From the late Victorian era the recorder developed alongside and sometimes in conjunction with the revival of Shakespeare's plays; there was a clear relationship between the attempts to understand and re-create the English musical successes of the 16th and 17th centuries and the efforts made by the establishment to rejuvenate the nation's culture in terms of new composition. Using Dolmetsch's recorder programmes as a starting-point, it is suggested that the chief figures of the English musical renaissance were more conscious of and indebted to the contemporaneous revival of early music than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Antica nova: Suite #1 for Harpsichord (1987-96), and: Antica nova: Suite #4 for Harpsichord (1987-96), and: Harpsichord Sonata #1 (1998), and: Harpsichord Sonata #2 (1998), and: Harpsichord Sonata #3 (1998), and: Semi-Suite: for Harpsichord (One or Two Manuals) or Piano, and: Vignette: for Harpsichord (1975), and: Elegy (Canaanite Fantasy No. 3): for Harpsichord [1990], and: Pegasos: fur Cembalo [1991], and:

It has been more than a hundred years since the harpsichord was rescued from extinction. The story of its disappearance and resurrection is familiar to most musicians and historians. After being rapidly supplanted by the piano during the last decades of the eighteenth century, it ceased to be a viable musical instrument throughout the nineteenth. The harpsichord was rarely played during the romantic period, and even then only as a charming curiosity—and composers would never consider writing new music for it. Thanks to the efforts of pioneers such as Wanda Landowska, Arnold Dolmetsch, Ralph Kirkpatrick, and others in the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the harpsichord began to be played and heard again. It has now fully regained its position as the preeminent keyboard instrument for the music composed during the baroque era.

The Six Early Clavichords of Arnold Dolmetsch: Their Construction and Inspiration

The Six Early Clavichords of Arnold Dolmetsch: Their Construction and Inspiration

The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder

Foreword Daniel Bruggen 1. The recorder in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Howard Mayer Brown 2. The recorder's Medieval and Renaissance repertoire: a commentary Anthony Rowland-Jones 3. The baroque recorder sonata Anthony Rowland-Jones 4. The baroque chamber music repertoire Anthony Rowland-Jones 5. The orchestral recorder Adrienne Simpson 6. The eighteenth-century recorder concerto David Lasocki and Anthony Rowland-Jones 7. Instruction books and methods for the recorder c.1500 to the present day David Lasocki 8. The recorder revival i: the friendship of Bernard Shaw and Arnold Dolmetsch J. M. Thomson 9. The recorder revival ii: the twentieth century and its repertoire Eve O'Kelly 10. Professional recorder players i: pre-twentieth century David Lasocki 11. Professional recorder players (and their instruments) ii: the twentieth century Eve O'Kelly 12. The recorder in education Eve O'Kelly 13. Facsimiles and editing Clifford Bartlett 14. Guide to further reading Anthony Rowland-Jones.

Rehabilitating William Lawes

Even amid the celebrations of the Purcell tercentenary, the 350th anniversary of William Lawes's death at the Battle of Rowton Moor on 24 September 1645 did not go uncommemorated, and it has occasioned some significant and collectable souvenirs. They include the first complete recordings of the Royall Consort, a collection of instrumental pieces which, as Dr Burney remarked, 'was always mentioned with reverence' by the composer's admirers in the 17th century: William Lawes: The Royall Consort suites (Chandos CHAN 0584/5, rec 1994), by the Purcell Quartet with Nigel North and Paul O'Dette, and the first disc of William Lawes: Royall Consort suites (ASV CD GAU 146, rec 1995), by the Greate Consort directed by Monica Huggett. Their release coincided with the publication of David Pinto's edition of these suites, and also of his book For the Violls, which devotes a chapter to them (both reviewed by Mark Levy, EM, xxiv/3 (Aug 1996), pp.507-11). Burney transcribed samples of the Royall Consort from old partbooks, but they left him baffled and unimpressed-'one of the most dry, aukward, and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring', he wrote in 1789. Arnold Dolmetsch had greater faith in the work, and included a suite from it (performed on four viols and harpsichord) in a concert of music by William and Henry Lawes in February 1894. But the complexity of the work's textual history for a long time impeded proper appraisal. In Jeffrey Pulver's Biographical dictionary of old English music (1927), for example, it is misleadingly described as a 'set of short suites for three Viols, or other combination'. Ernst Hermann Meyer, too, could give only a flawed overview of the work, hampered as he was by the difficulties of research in wartime London, but he did at least conclude that it would be 'altogether well worth reviving' (English chamber music (London, 1946), pp.180-83). Thanks, however, to the work of Murray Lefkowitz, Gordon Dodd and now David Pinto, the Royall Consort has come to be seen as an important collection of 'progressive and beautifully crafted works' (to quote Bruce Wood's notes for the Purcell Quartet discs). In the 50 years since Meyer's book appeared its rehabilitation has come a long way, as these recordings comprehensively demonstrate. In one source (Oxford, Christ Church, Music Mss. 391-6) the Royall Consort is described as 'Sixe Setts of Musicke' in the six keys D minor, D major, A minor, C major, F major and B6 major. The D minor and D major 'setts' are substantially longer than the others, however, and (although the order of movements varies somewhat from manuscript to manuscript) each can be subdivided fairly naturally into three. Lefkowitz's consequent classification of the collection as ten suites (see William Lawes (London, 1960), pp.68-87, 267-8) has won general acceptance, although Pinto prefers to speak often 'setts'. ('Sett', 'suit' and 'suite' were virtually synonymous in Lawes's day.) Lefkowitz was also the first to recognize that most of the pieces exist in two different scorings: a so-called 'old version' for two trebles, tenor viol, bass viol and thorough bass, and a 'new version' whose instrumentation is made explicit by Lawes in his autograph score-book-'Two Violins, 2 Base Violls and 2 Theorboes'. A note by Edward Lowe, a friend of the Lawes family who was Professor of Music at Oxford from 1661 to 1682, in the bassus partbook of his 'parchment bookes' (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Mus. Sch. D.236, f.lv) sheds some light on the revision and the reason behind it:

PERCY GRAINGER AND THE REVIVAL OF EARLY ENGLISH POLYPHONY: THE ANSELM HUGHES CORRESPONDENCE

WHILE THE exuberant and multi-faceted genius of Percy Grainger has been acknowledged increasingly since his death in 1961, his significant contribution to the early music revival has yet to receive the recognition it deserves.' From the early 1930s he worked for three decades with missionary if sporadic zeal-as teacher, editor and performer-to promote what he considered to be the 'positively overwhelming' corpus of 'early European music of the first rank'.2 In a number of instances, his own interest was awakened by the pioneering work of others, notably Arnold Dolmetsch in the field of viol consort music3 and Dom Anselm Hughes in that of early English polyphony. With the latter he embarked on the task of editing for practical use a collection of sacred and secular pieces dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries; although only seven items were eventually published, English Gothic Music (henceforth EGM), as the series was named, represents an important early attempt to bring this reportory to the attention of a wider public. For much of the period of their collaboration, Hughes and Grainger were separated by the Atlantic, conducting their discussions by post. The resulting wealth of correspondence-spanning some 23 years-constitutes an important source for our understanding both of Grainger's pioneering if idiosyncratic contribution to the early music revival and of the particular significance of the rediscovery of pre-Renaissance repertories to his own construction of music history and his democratic ambitions for the universal dissemination and appreciation of all types of music. Grainger first became acquainted with Hughes's work in 1932, soon after being appointed head of the music department at New York University College of Fine Arts. In the course of a lecture tour of the USA earlier in the year, Hughes had been heard by Gustave Reese, then working alongside Grainger as a part-time instructor in medieval music.4 Reese introduced Grainger to Hughes's recently published

On playing the clavichord

My first encounter with a clavichord took place in the autumn of 1929 at the beginning of my third year as an undergraduate at Harvard. The instrument, a fiveoctave Chickering built under the direction of Arnold Dolmetsch, had recently been given to Harvard by its first owner, who, it seems, had purchased it on 12 June 1911. (This was exactly two days after my birth.) When I first opened its dark green Flemish case the shimmer of its yet untarnished strings and of the white and gold lacquer that surrounded the inscription, PLVS FAIT DOVCEVR QVE VIOLENCE, made an impression on me that later came to be fused in my mind with the description given by Dolmetsch h mself in The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth a d X Vlllth Centuries (London, [1915]/R 1969): The clavichord is an instrument of very great simplicity... and of tone s little that it compares better, for colour and power, to the humming of bees than to the most delicate among instruments ... The clavichord has strings of brass, very slender, two for each note ... But if you look through the gold web of which the close strings give an illusion, you will see on each key-end an upright blade of brass ready to come and touch the strings ... when that note is required. This blade of brass is the tangent; its contact alone makes the tone ... The player, through the keys, keeps in touch with the s rings, and thus can impel them with every motion of his mind. But e is debarred from ... making a

Performing Nineteenth-Century Music on Nineteenth-Century Instruments

Arnold Dolmetsch's The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries appeared quietly in 1915. In one bold stroke its author staked out a preeminent position as the first to grapple comprehensively in any language with the problems of historical performances of repertoires before Haydn and Mozart. That his study remains well-thumbed today-it was reprinted as recently as 1969-is testimonial both to its profuse documentation and to its practical bent. For Dolmetsch old meant the various instrumental styles of the Baroque, and consequently more than half of his treatise is devoted to ornamentation alone. His views were unfailingly independent and not infrequently eccentric-as in this aside, one of the few concerning music with which we are more directly concerned: How the tenor violin came to be discarded is incomprehensible. Any orchestral score, be it Haydn's or Wagner's, shows the crying need of it.' But apart from offhand remarks of this sort, it seems apparent that Dolmetsch felt no pressing need to turn a similar searchlight on music between Bach and his own time.

Keyboard lessons with Arnold Dolmetsch

Journal Article Keyboard lessons with Arnold Dolmetsch Get access ELIZABETH GOBLE ELIZABETH GOBLE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 1977, Pages 89–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/5.1.89 Published: 01 January 1977

Arnold Dolmetsch, the Man and His Work

Arnold Dolmetsch, the Man and His Work