Autograph Manuscript Research Articles

Twelve-Tone Technique in Varèse's Sketches of Déserts

TWELVE-TONE TECHNIQUE IN VARÈSE’S SKETCHES OF DÉSERTS EVELINE VERNOOIJ 1. INTRODUCTION ÉSERTS (1954) IS ONE OF EDGARD VARÈSE’S most emblematic compositions. The work was initially conceived as a utopian multimedia project involving both visual images and organized sound, but, unable to find the cinematographic support for this project, Déserts premiered on December 2, 1954 in Paris as a composition for wind instruments, piano, percussion, and magnetic tape. Despite a growing interest in the underlying structures of Déserts, many aspects of its pitch structure have proved elusive. Although previous analytical interpretations differ, they have all been based almost exclusively on the published score. This paper will present a different approach: by integrating source studies with interpretative analysis, the goal is to formulate an analytical approach based on evidence gathered from the composer’s working documents. The autograph and ideograph sources of Déserts, the majority of which are conserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel (Switzerland), not only constitute an indispensable source of information on the genesis of the work, but also reveal its abstract. The D 224 Perspectives of New Music developmental strategies found in the sketches and drafts of Déserts provide the theoretical framework for a new perspective on one of Varèse’s most significant works. The compositional process of the instrumental score of Déserts, from its first elaborations up to the published score, is documented by fifteen sketches, an autograph manuscript, a multi-layered draft on transparent paper (written by his assistant, Chou Wen-Chung), and six diazo prints with autograph corrections and accretions.1 The sketches, mainly short scores, belong to different stages of the compositional process: many are preliminary documents preceding the first complete draft of the score, others reveal a more advanced stage of composition and are contemporary to the subsequent diazo prints. The autograph manuscript represents the first complete draft of the score, which was then copied by Chou Wen-Chung onto transparent paper. The diazo prints are derived from different levels of editing of these transparencies . Each time, the corrections and accretions to a print were incorporated by Chou Wen-Chung in the diazo transparencies and a new print would follow, until the score had reached a version considered suitable for publication. The score of Déserts was deposited with Casa Ricordi in 1956, who published the work in 1959.2 The sketches, in particular, provide clues to the underlying structures of the orchestral score. The serial labels and order numbers found in several of the sketches reveal a hitherto unknown aspect of Varèse’s compositional procedures: the organization of pitch structure by means of twelve-tone operations. The abundance of twelve-tone row labels and order numbers in the sketches indicates that the composer systematically employed different row forms throughout the instrumental score of Déserts. The row forms signaled in the sketches provide a new perspective on Varèse’s late compositional technique. Autograph row labeling is not exclusive to the preparatory material for Déserts, the only work analyzed in this article, but can be found in the sketches for Etude pour Espace, Poème électronique, and Nocturnal as well. In spite of the large amount of row tables and musical fragments with series labels and order numbers in the composer’s preparatory material, previous studies of the source material of Varèse’s compositions have often minimized the extent of Varèse’s serial thought. Dieter Nanz, for instance, ignores the order numbers in the sketches for Déserts and speculates that the alphanumeric labels refer to some kind of pre-compositional classification of short musical figures.3 One example of such a figuration would be the major-third/minor-second trichord. Jonathan Bernard, on the other hand, focuses his attention solely on the order numbers.4 Bernard suggests that the series labels and order numbers simply provided Varèse with a convenient system Twelve-Tone Technique in Varèse’s Sketches of Déserts 225 for keeping track of the pitches he was using within each block of several measures. He excludes that Varèse was “following a real twelvetone practice,” because the composer systematically...

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Matthew Fisher David Watt, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series.” Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013. $99.95. Writing poetry about writing poetry is a temptation that few poets have resisted. Thomas Hoccleve is not among that select few. In the middle of [End Page 347] the twentieth century, Robert Graves dismissed “what passes as English poetry” as “the product of either careerism, or keeping one’s hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.” David Watt’s book, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” attempts to uncover where along that spectrum we can place Hoccleve’s literary labor and its products as aesthetic and material propositions. Watt takes as his primary subject the process, not the product, of Hoccleve’s writing, and to that end interrogates its material remnants and the poetic fictions of its composition. Watt begins his book with a bold observation: “This is not the book I initially planned to write. The version of this book that I had in my head was never the version on the page in front of me” (1). Such a statement is honest, and draws attention to the chasms between intentionality and execution that are at the heart of all creative and critical endeavors. At the same time, Watt implies that the book escaped his control in some way. Though he thus sets up a parallel for his arguments about the complexities of Hoccleve’s compositional difficulties, it is a disturbing beginning. His frank honesty about the potential failures of process suggest that the product, too, may be problematic. The book offers a sustained engagement with the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, and though many of its points are locally persuasive, it does not quite succeed in offering a critical framework that can make compelling sense of the gap between anticipation and execution it perceives in Hoccleve’s poetry. More successful is Watt’s attempt to focus on both the ephemeralities and the materialities of the poetic process. As Watt argues in the book’s introduction, “the Series offers a reflection on, not a reflection of, his [Hoccleve’s] conception of book production” (4). To this end, Watt marshals paleographical evidence along with careful close readings of the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, a sequence of five distinct and interrelated Middle English poems, the best known of which are the first two, the “Complaint” and “Dialogue.” “Learn to Die” has occasioned some more recent criticism, but the remaining two poems, “The Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife” and “The Tale of Jonathas,” have warranted little critical attention over many years. A book-length study of Hoccleve’s Series is a welcome contribution to the field. Watt is to be commended for his sustained focus on Hoccleve’s complexly allusive poetry, and his careful encounter with the manuscript instantiations of that verse. The three autograph manuscripts of Hoccleve’s poetry (or possibly four, as Linne Mooney has recently argued in these pages) have been [End Page 348] disproportionately subject to the kind of paleographically and codico-logically grounded literary criticism that Watt assays. The first chapter of The Making attempts to construct Hoccleve’s likely audience “in and for the Series” through the lens of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111. Watt reads the claims of Hoccleve’s narrator persona “Thomas” as reflecting and responding to the issues faced by Hoccleve and his poetry, and its reception by a coterie readership among the clerks of the Privy Seal. Watt argues Hoccleve’s poems “are meant to circulate among those at work in the Privy Seal and elsewhere in Westminster Hall” (31). That “elsewhere” ultimately covers quite a bit of ground, deriving from Ethan Knapp’s exposition of Hoccleve’s bureaucratic vision and Emily Steiner’s Langlandian documentary imagination, and stretching back to the coterie audiences of Piers Plowman described by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others. Watt asserts an imagined audience ranging from the king, to the upper echelons of the nobility, to Hoccleve’s fellow clerks. His depiction of a stratified and plural audience for the Series, its multiple valences carefully crafted...

La biblioteca di Pietro Crinito: Manoscritti e libri a stampa della raccolta libraria di un umanista fiorentino by Michaelangiola Marchiaro (review)

Reviewed by: La biblioteca di Pietro Crinito: Manoscritti e libri a stampa della raccolta libraria di un umanista fiorentino by Michaelangiola Marchiaro Sabina Zonno Michaelangiola Marchiaro, La biblioteca di Pietro Crinito: Manoscritti e libri a stampa della raccolta libraria di un umanista fiorentino, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 67 (Porto: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales 2013) 342 pp. As Michaelangiola Marchiaro explains in her introduction to the volume, she publishes here the most significant results of her doctoral dissertation devoted to the Florentine humanist Pietro Crinito (1474–1507) and his book collection. Her work won the international prize for the doctoral dissertations of the Fundación Ana María Aldama Roy de Estudios Latinos that sponsored her publication. The aim of the research was to identify and catalogue, systematically and for the first time, all the manuscripts written by Crinito and also the codices and incunables he owned. This series of books had never been investigated as a whole by the critics who focused mainly on the part of the collection formed by those codices previously in the hands of a more prominent humanist, Angelo Poliziano. As a result, Crinito was known to the scholars just because he had the privilege of inheriting and keeping some of the papers of Poliziano. Marchiaro consequently intends to document Crinito’s literary and philosophical interests and his prolific activity, highlighting for the first time his role as an active intellectual in the Renaissance Florentine context. The work is addressed to the specialists who are already skilled in the field but a deeper description of Florence at the time when the city was uniquely enlivened by the revival of classical literature, art, and architecture would have probably helped also the non-specialist readers appreciate more the research enjoying the distinctive nature of Florentine humanism and its protagonists. The first chapter of the volume contains the biography of Pietro Crinito. The information on his life, education, and knowledge derived from the examined manuscripts update the entry on Crinito published in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani in 1990. The investigation into his book collection lets us know he was a learned and enlightened man who came into contact with many distinguished people of high intellect and good education. The list of tutors he was taught by is particularly interesting: first, Paolo Sassi da Roncigliano who had instructed him in grammar from 1486 as the initial part of a manuscript in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence testifies to; second, Ugolino Verino who was his tutor till September 1491 at least. In this period, Crinito was also in contact with the very illustrious intellectuals of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court probably because of his studies at the library of St. Mark’s and the Florentine studium. For example, he knew Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Lorenzi, Bartolomeo Scala, and Angelo Poliziano. Crinito writes that Poliziano was his preceptor but there are no information on the classes he could have attended. It was after the death of Poliziano that Crinito acquired various autograph manuscripts written by the master. He also rearranged and edited some of his works. As a private teacher, he encouraged his students to devote themselves to the studia humanitates as in the case of his disciple and friend Giovanni Ugolini. Crinito travelled in Italy visiting some of the most active cultural cities in the country: he was in Venice, as he writes in a chapter of his work entitled De honesta disciplina, and in Rome in 1503. There, he met the most distinguished [End Page 281] scholars of the time such as Tommaso Fusco, Lucio “Fosforo” Fazzini, and Bernardo Carafa, as some pieces dedicated to them in the Pöemata confirm. In February 1507, he was professor of rhetoric and poetry at the Florentine studium, but he enjoyed his academic life for a short time because he died in July. There were no heirs who could inherit his volumes eventually obtained by Benedetto Varchi and Pier Vettori. In particular, the series of books in the hands of the Vettori family were in Italy till 1778 when Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria bought them. Now, they are kept in the Bayerische...

Two Editions of Ravel's Piano Trio

Maurice Ravel. Trio pour piano, violon et violoncelle. Edite par = Edited by = Herausgegeben von Juliette Appold. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2009. [Introd. Ger., Eng., Fre., p. iii-xx; score, p. 1-42 and 2 parts (violon and violoncelle); appendix, p. 43-44; plates, p. 45-46; crit. commentary, p. 47-52. ISMN 979-0-006-53819-5; pub. no. BA 9418. [euro]27.95.] Maurice Ravel. Klaviertrio = Piano Trio. Herausgegeben von = Edited by Peter Jost. Fingersatz der Klavierstimme von = Fingering of piano part by Pascal Roge. Munich: G. Henle, 2012. [Preface Ger., Eng., Fre., p. iii-vii; analytical note by Maurice Ger., Eng., Fre., p. viii-ix; score, p. 1-45 and.2 parts (violin and violoncello); Bemerkungen = Comments, p. 46-53; Ubersetzung der Vortrags- und Tempobezeichnungen = Translation of Expression and Tempo Marks, p. 54. ISMN 979-0-20180972-4; pub. no. HN 972. [euro]25.1 In the early 1990s, when works briefly emerged from copyright, the first critical editions of his piano music (from Edition Peters.) opened with a brief discussion by their editor, Roger Nichols, of the delicate relationship between manuscripts and editions. Nichols's first two paragraphs end respectively: apparently laudable desire to go back to what the composer originally wrote needs therefore to be tempered with a certain amount of common sense. and in the course of conversations with a number of composers of our own time, I am given overwhelmingly to understand that they would actually be angry if future editors ignored their carefully prepared printed scores and went hack automatically to their original autographs for a so-called true reading (Roger Nichols, Ravel's Piano Music--A New Edition, Maurice Ravel, Gaspard de la nail [London: Edition Peters, 19911, 3). This general philosophy has long informed critical editing, to the point that the term urtext (original text) has tacitly come to encompass the composer's Fassung letzter Hand. The recent reemergence of music from a further stint copyright has now prompted editions of his Piano Trio from Barenreiter and Henle, both of which favor manuscript fair copy of 1914 over the first edition of 1915. Completed September 1914 St-Jean-de-Luz, the manuscript. shows notable variants from the first edition (published 1w Durand June 1915, several months after the work's concert premiere on 28 January), particularly the Pantoum second movement where it presents some different instrumental textures and one less measure on its last page. As this was the manuscript submitted by to his publisher Durand, the first edition's variants evidently result from intermediate emendation. Henle's and Barenreiter's editors explain their decision as having been prompted by one reported document and a pair of published ones: a set of instructions now lost. drawn up by as he was preparing to enlist the armed services early autumn 1914, reportedly containing details of exactly how to print his newly completed Trio the event of his unavailability or demise; and the memoirs of friend Alfredo Casella (i he pianist at the Trio's premiere), who recalled, decades later, that entrusted me with the correction of the proofs, as he himself was at war (as quoted the Henle edition, p. v; original Alfredo Casella: Gli anni di Parigi: Dai documenti, ed. Roberto Calabretto [Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1997], 87). The Barenreiter edition quotes a slightly variant memoir: Ravel was very grateful to me [for the Trio's first performance] and wished me to correct the proofs of the work (p. ix; cited from Music My Time: The Memoirs of Alfredo Casella, trans. and ed. Spencer Norton [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955], 122). On that basis, both editions conclude that the first edition's variants from the autograph manuscript cannot reliably be regarded as authentic. The obvious implication is noted the Barenreiter introduction: Whether Casella ultimately adhered to notes correcting the proofs or made changes of his own can no longer be determined today (pp. …

The Never-Ending Story: Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher

Liszt’s interest in the figure of Jeanne d’Arc accompanied the composer throughout his life. He chose a poem by Alexandre Dumas père for the text of the romance dramatique Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. After the first version for voice and piano published in 1846, the composer asked August Conradi for an instrumental arrangement. In 1858 Liszt planned a stage work on the subject of Jeanne d’Arc, but did not fulfill the plan and confined himself to revising the romance. In the 1860s Liszt composed three different new settings of Dumas’s text but never published them. After a rewriting in 1874 for voice and piano (or orchestra), the composer finally published his song (1876). With this, the list of the multiple settings is not yet complete. Some years ago the Fondazione Istituto Liszt (Bologna) bought an autograph manuscript for organ not included in the catalogues of Liszt’s works. This study reconstructs the story of the composition and performance of Jeanne d’Arc with organ accompaniment.

Some Thoughts on the Use of Autograph Manuscripts in Editing the Works of Verdi and Puccini

No one believes an autograph manuscript provides sufficient information to allow scholars to edit nineteenth- or early twentieth-century music, particularly in genres that accepted considerable modifications in performance, opera or virtuosic piano music. If anything, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, with doubts cast on the role of composers' autographs in choosing texts to serve for critical editions. This latter approach is problematical, even for composers known to introduce significant changes in their works to ensure their survival in the theater. One needs always to cite (while not necessarily adopting) autograph readings, which tend to reflect compositional concerns rather than practical concerns. A critical edition may ultimately present a text oriented toward practical solutions, but it demands that users understand why and how a composer's ideas could not be maintained. This is particularly true for a composer like Verdi, who left autograph manuscripts close to a definitive version, but it is also true for a composer like Puccini who expected autograph manuscripts to be superseded in performance.

New York, London, Ireland: Collector John Quinn's Transatlantic Network, c. 1900–1917

In the early 1900s John Quinn (1879–1924), Ohio-born son of Irish Catholic immigrants, was establishing a successful financial law career in Manhattan and had begun what became an all-consuming passion, collecting. At first he collected literature, especially Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, William Morris and George Meredith, autograph manuscripts where possible, and then fine art, initially prints and drawings. Quinn himself was to be a key driver behind the 1913 Armory Show in New York and, in the years around the First World War, an increasingly prodigious collector of French modernism in particular, a process made all the easier by his own success that year in driving through anti-tariff legislation on the import to America of original works of art. The later development of Quinn's art collecting has been widely discussed, most notably in 1978 by the art historian and museum curator Judith Zilczer, and his life as a whole very closely detailed a decade earlier in Benjamin L. Reid's 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Man from New York. My focus in this article is on the shifts and transformations of Quinn's earlier patterns of collecting from the turn of the century up to and including his interests in Vorticism, on his Irish collection in particular and on exploring Quinn's practices in relation to some recent studies of transnationalism, transculturation and the nature and operation of transatlantic networks in the market for art.

La mise en prose des Vigiles des morts de Pierre de Nesson, texte inconnu attribuable à Jean Miélot

In 1457, the Burgundian copyist and writer Jean Miélot transcribed in his own hand most of the Latin and French prayers added to a personal book of hours belonging to Philip the Good, who had inherited it from his grandfather, Philip the Bold (BRUSSELS, KBR, ms. 11035 – 37). Among these is a prose version of the Vigiles des Morts by the French poet Pierre de Nesson. This article presents this text, unknown to philologists until now, and suggests that it should be attributed to Jean Miélot ; this copy (the only evidence of this text) would therefore be an autograph manuscript. A study of the way the translator has turned the verse of the Vigiles into prose enables us to refine our knowledge of the nature and role of the drafting and copying work performed by Jean Miélot for the Duke of Burgundy.

Benedetto Cotrugli's Lost Mappamundi Found—Three Times

ABSTRACT Benedetto Cotrugli's De navigatione, composed in 1464–1465, is the earliest known European manual of navigation. Two manuscripts of the work survive; in both a space is left blank for a mappamundi alluded to in the text. Here I identify three mappaemundi, in different works, as having come from or been derived from Cotrugli's. The first is the unstudied mappamundi that was added to the beginning (fol. 2v) of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Ottob. lat. 1417. The second is the only mappamundi in any of the manuscripts of Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Liber insularum archipelagi (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 108, fol. 81r). The third is the unstudied mappamundi in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 1077, fol. 4v. The last two mappaemundi are similar to that in MS. Ottob. lat. 1417, and reasons are adduced to confirm that they were copied from mappaemundi in manuscripts of Cotrugli's work. The toponyms on the Vatican and Berlin maps are compared, and the implications of these mappaemundi for the format of Cotrugli's autograph manuscript and the diffusion of his work are explored.

Manos Teatrales: Cyber-Paleography and Early Modern Spanish Theater

Both before and after Gutenberg, the history of artistic, social, and political events has often been recorded in handwritten documents: historical chronicles, literary texts, musical scores, religious and philosophical treatises, ambassadorial and military reports, and the correspondence of authors, scientists, and political figures with the world around them. Literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, and others spend endless hours locating, deciphering, and evaluating these manuscripts. While access to these manuscripts was once difficult, digital technology is making increasing numbers of such documents available; but it has yet to make them easy to read and to evaluate for all but a tiny minority of specialists.The Manos Teatrales project, directed by the authors of this note, employs cyber-paleography techniques to open up and analyze the surviving wealth of manuscripts from Spanish Golden Age theater and related archival records that link that theater to the surrounding society. The procedures we use and describe below could be extended to other manuscript collections. The results of our research are constructed as a live, layered virtual world on the Web, centered on a searchable database, and this information is accessible to librarians, scholars, students, and interested individuals anywhere at www.manosteatrales.org. Our processes have been developed with support from a Duke University Provost's Common Fund grant, from National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies digital initiative grants (2009-2010), and from further work on automatic writer identification with researchers at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2011-2013).Theater in Golden Age Spain, as in Elizabethan England and classical Greece, flourished as a central cultural institution. From the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries, drama was the most popular form of entertainment throughout the Spanish empire. Fast-moving three-act dramas were performed in public theaters, on palace stages, and even aboard ships to America; and autos sacramentales-allegorical religious drama-was performed on carts in town and city streets. Great playwrights-Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca-and dozens of other writers penned thousands of dramas to meet the insatiable demand. In contrast to the case of England, however, a treasure trove that awaits students of Golden Age Spanish plays is the existence of hundreds of autographed, partially autograph and unsigned manuscripts of the plays. Many of the manuscripts left by the great dramatists have served as copy-texts for good modern editions, but relatively little has been done with the hundreds of unsigned manuscripts that survived in collections in Spain, other European countries, and America. In the Biblioteca Nacional Espanola (BNE) and the Theater Institute of Barcelona alone, they number well over fifteen hundred. Identifying their copyists yields information valuable not only for the evaluation of the manuscripts in question but also for understanding the organization and operation of the theatrical working community. These manuscripts show that some copyists worked closely with dramatists, making clean copies of their drafts, while other manuscripts reflect the work of a theater company owner who modified the text to suit his company's capabilities and his sense of audience preferences. Others made copies for specific actors, or for sale, and a few, anticipating today's movie pirates who use hand-held cameras, made their copies from memory after seeing a performance.Significant progress in the field of handwriting recognition has enabled practical applications in constrained modern domains, such as the recognition of postal codes. Although the challenges posed by writer identification in old manuscripts are greater than those that pertain to modern forensic uses, the goal is the same. Manos Teatrales originated in Margaret Greer's evaluation of a manuscript of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's court spectacle drama La estatua de Prometeo that she found in the Biblioteca Historica Municipal of Madrid in 1980 and edited. …

Levels of authorial presence in Anonymus Londiniensis (P.Brit. Libr. inv. 137)

In the autograph manuscript of the so-called Anonymus Londiniensis (P.Br.Libr. inv. 137), an isagogic text on medicine and the causes of disease, we have an interesting case study to focus on how an ancient author composed a new work by compiling a handful of written sources. In particular, through the text's analysis, my aim is to recognise, within the language mosaic, an ‘authorial’ language or layer that basically expresses the writer’s doctrinal choices.

D. Pedro II tradutor: análise do processo criativo

This paper investigates the translation work of D. Pedro II. Throughout his life he showed great interest in languages. He spoke German, Italian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hebrew and Tupi-Guarani. He read Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit and “Provençal”. He translated from Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, Italian and English. The aim of this research is to delineate the creative process of the translator through the Genetics Critics and the Descriptive Studies of Translation, because both of them privilege the process in relation to the final product. The main documentary sources on which this research is based on are autograph manuscripts of direct translations from Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French and Sanskrit, the Emperor's diary, in addition to letters and books from his personal library. The paper intends to rebuild not only the translator profile of D. Pedro II, his ideas and attitudes towards the translation activity, but also the study of the unique network of contacts, readings and influences proceeding from many cultures, not only Europeans, that the Emperor was able to intertwined.

Alfieri e il magistero dantesco

This article proposes an in-depth analysis of the various ways in which Vittorio Alfieri responded to the works and figure of Dante. Through an examination of Alfieri’s autograph manuscripts and writings, which retrace the poet’s life-long acquaintance with Dante’s works, this article will show how Alfieri, in contrast to the ongoing trends of his time, did not look to Dante merely as a means by which to develop his own personal poetic voice. Instead, Alfieri found that the two shared various biographical and literary affinities and detected an intimate spiritual and ideological common ground with the ancient master, referring to him in Del Principe e delle Lettere as the perfect example of the ‘unprotected’ poet.

'Her Heed They Caste Awry': The Transmission and Reception of Thomas Hoccleve's Personal Poetry

Whereas most critics of Thomas Hoccleve's poetry have focused on elucidating the author's particular mode of self-presentation, this essay sets out to demonstrate that few fifteenth-century readers beyond the poet's initial addressees enjoyed his artful self-portraiture per se. Until now, Hoccleve Studies have been dominated by the texts preserved in the autograph manuscripts produced by the poet towards the end of his life. When we turn to the non-autograph traditions of his works, however, it becomes clear that Hoccleve's poems were preserved in a variety of forms and contexts and that medieval readers' experiences of these texts must have been considerably more varied than has typically been allowed. While Hoccleve's own exemplification of the link between self-fashioning and book production in the Series may have provided an important stimulus for the selective reception of this work, I explore the possibility that the highly unusual nature of the poet's most personal texts led to their sidelining in the reproduction of his corpus. Accordingly, I suggest, consideration of the fifteenth-century transmission and reception of Hoccleve's personal poetry can illuminate not only the often deeply self-serving nature of reading and textual reproduction in late medieval England; it can also provide a fresh indication of the extent to which some of Hoccleve's texts depart from the norms of the literary and codicological cultures in which their author participates.

Konzert für Violine und Orchester = Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Dem Andenken eines Engels , and: Violinkonzert = Violin Concerto , and: Violinkonzert “Dem Andenken eines Engels.” (review)

Alban Berg. Konzert fur violine und Orchester = Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: Andenken eines Herausgegeben von Michael Kube. (Breitkopf & Hartels Partitur-Bibliothek, Nr. 15113.) (Urtext.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel; Munich: Henle, 2010. [Pref. & glossary Ger., Eng.; crit. report Ger.; score, p. 1-87. ISMN-13 979-0-004-21272-1; pub. no. PB 15113. [euro] 14.] Alban Berg. Violinkonzert = Violin Concerto. Herausgegeben von = Edited by Michael Kube. Klavierauszug = Piano Reduction by Jan Philip Schulze. Mit zusatzlecher bezeichneter Violinstimme von = With supplementary violin part marked by Frank Peter Zimmerman. (Urtext.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel; Munich: Henle, 2009. [Pref. Ger., Eng., Fre., p. iv xi; instrumentation, p. xii; score, p. 1-51. comments Ger., Eng.. p. 53-57; trans. of expression and tempo marks, p. 59; 2 violin parts, 18 p. each. ISMN-13 979-02018-0821-5; pub. nos. HN 821, EB 10821. [euro] 24.50.] Alban Berg. Violinkonzert Dem Andenken eines Engels. Faksimile nach dem Autograph der Library of Congress, Washington. Mit einem Konimentar von Douglas Jarman. (Meisterwerke der Musik im Faksimile, Bd. 22.) Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2011. [Intro. Ger., Eng., p. 5-12; fats, score, 12, 39, p. ISBN-13 978-3-89007-758-1. [euro] 178.] In (he nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, performers were often high-handed their dealings with musical works ... and the wildest emotionalism often guided their performances. ... The beginning cif this century saw a change of heart: musicians and musicologists pleaded for greater textual fidelity, for closer observation of the composer's directions. ... Today's musician is unprecedentedly text-conscious and there is a greater demand for 'original versions' than at any previous time. ... It is the task of the interpreter to combine close observation of the letter (assisted by an alert critical faculty) and the spirit. ... I have recently been faced with such a dilemma when studying the violin concerto by Alban Berg for (Max Rostal, Rostal & Hans Keller, Violin Concerto: A Revision, Musical Times 95, no. 1332 [February 1954]: 87) The issues surrounding scholarship and performance are addressed admirably by violinist Max Rostal and musicologist hams Keller a consideration of the cadenza Alban Berg's Violin Concerto that contains a passage of intricate counterpoint (mvt. 2. mm. 78-90) for which Berg supplied an ossia version for the violin and a solo viola. The purpose of this alternative passage is In clarify the counterpoint, somewhat obscured the solo violin part. regarded as an arrangement of the ossia this interpretation. Keller writes an approving commentary and notes that Rostal's version includes (1) changed notes [i.e., f# to f[??] m. 82, for an obvious misprint]; (2) changed notevalues; (3) octave transposition; and (4) ... 're-scoring.' Feeling that in his endeavour to make the passage playable, the composer had deviated too far from his original intention (Rostal, p. 87), Rostal substituted his version performance. Keller and Rostal's engagement with the Violin Concerto sets the stage for a consideration of these recently published urtext editions of the score and piano reduction, and a facsimile of the autograph. The facsimile edition comes from the autograph manuscript. held at the Library of Congress, with comments by Douglas Jarman. The new editions of the score and piano reduction were produced by a joint venture of Henle Verlag and Breitkopf & Hartel. Previous editions of the Violin Concerto include miniature scores from Universal Edition published 1936, then 1964 with three pages of analytical notes by F. S., then 1996 a revised edition with two pages of notes by Jarman, following his edition for the Samtliche Werke, Bd. 5, Teil 2 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1996). Jarman's complete-works edition mentions a Volume IV' that was intended to contain extensive comments, but it seems this volume has not appeared. …

YOUTH, RELIGIOUS IDENTITY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE ENGLISH COLLEGES IN ROME AND VALLADOLID, 1592–1685

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the records of 595 entrants to the English College, Rome, and 309 entrants to the English College, Valladolid. These Colleges, set up to train young English men as Catholic priests at a time when Catholicism was proscribed in England, required all entrants to complete questionnaires covering their social, educational, and religious background. TheResponsa Scholarumare the autograph manuscripts of students at Rome; theLiber Primi Examinisconsists of summaries of oral examinations written down by the interviewers. Through a combination of quantitative analysis and close reading of individual accounts, this article explores responses to the questionnaires, focusing on the engagement of young people with religion and religious identity. It argues that their self-writings shed important light on our understanding of both early modern religion and of early modern childhood and adolescence.

Review of Peter Kaminsky ed., Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (University of Rochester Press, 2011)

[1] A monochromatic portrait graces the front cover of this recently released collection of essays on Ravel. With his gaze fixed at a point beyond the bottom left corner of the cover and an enigmatic smile a la Mona Lisa, the visage of Maurice Ravel is arresting. Its sense of mystique is heightened by the soft camera focus, which blurs all of the composer's features except for his left eye at the center of the portrait, and mono-directional lighting submerges half his face in shadow. Lack of clarity constrains the gaze of the reader, stimulating curiosity. We wonder what lies beyond the unreal perfection that the portrait allows us to see. Did Ravel's averted gaze forestall the communication of telling emotions? Did his smiling lips silence revealing remarks? This portrait of Ravel epitomizes a facade-it is an illusion that defends the privacy (one might even say secrecy) of the composer's inner being.[2] Kaminsky's volume promises to bring the reader beyond this facade. Its title proclaims that Ravel will be unmasked, and in the introduction, we learn that we shall understand Ravel's music beyond its aspects-beyond the pianistic virtuosity, sonorous extended tertian chords, and tonal cadences. We also learn that the essays in the volume will re-examine the master of Ravel scholarship: Ravel as a classicist, a masked personality, an artisan, a virtuoso, as someone who was artificial or cold, who engaged the aesthetics of imposture, and who was preoccupied with ornamentation (2). The reader is thus excited by the anticipation of discovering facets of Ravel that his public image has hitherto obscured, as well as the promise that we shall by such knowledge attain greater intimacy with a great musician.[3] De-mystifying Ravel, however, can also be perilous. Revealing the composer's trade secrets, especially by deconstructing the technical means that underlie or help create the iridescent of his music, might reduce its ineffable beauty, which seems in no small part sustained by the opacity of the tropes that have dominated the composer's public image. Kaminsky's introduction assuages some of the reader's fears, however. He explains that the book will re-examine the tropes in Ravel scholarship by engaging rather than glossing over the surface aspects of his music. It will seek less to debunk those tropes than to ride the wave of a recent trend in Ravel scholarship, which is to interpret these tropes in positive ways, as enabling imaginative and novel approaches to Ravel's musical language (3).[4] By and large, the book fulfills its promise. Steven Huebner's opening essay considers literary sources of influence on Ravel's music, ranging from the openly acknowledged to the merely suggested. Huebner first considers Edgar Allan Poe, whose creative philosophy Ravel openly admired. He then discusses poets whom Ravel never cited, but with whom he frequently kept company: Leon-Paul Fargue and Tristan Klingsor. Finally, he makes a case for the influence of Henri de Regnier, who inscribed poetry on Ravel's autograph manuscripts for Jeux d'eau and Valses nobles et sentimentales. Huebner's essay is followed by another excellent one by Barbara L. Kelly that details how critics and biographers have portrayed Ravel's artistic persona. Kelly also provides glimpses into how the composer's own representations of himself do not entirely fit into-or, one might say, add dissonant overtones to-the aesthetic position in which he was posthumously placed.[5] Other essays in the volume engage in creative exegeses of Ravel's main works. The discussion of La Valse by Volker Helbing, for example, is memorable both for its identification of Ravel's oblique references to traditional (Straussian) waltz idioms as well as for its violent and dramatic language, which prompts me to suggest that maelstrom might be a more suitable metaphor for the form of the work than Helbing's chosen term spiral.(1) Peter Kaminsky breaks new ground in his analysis of L'enfant et les sortileges by correlating elements of Ravel's formal and tonal design with psychoanalytic aspects of the opera's scenario. …

The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica (review)

Reviewed by: The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica Steven Nadler Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro. The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 205. Brill’s Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, 11. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. vi + 318. Cloth, $136.00. By any measure, it is a remarkable find. There was a small codex in the Vatican Library, marked Vat. Lat. 12838. It originally belonged to the Congregation of the Holy Office, which in 1917 inherited the role of keeper of the Index of Prohibited Books. The codex had been transferred to the Library with other materials in 1922. The manuscript, originally acquired in 1677, bore no author’s name. According to the card catalogue it is a Tractatus theologiae, a five-part “Theological Treatise.” Its contents are described as follows: Pars prima de Deo: Definitiones. / 1. Per causam. / Des. Tam difficilia quam rara sunt. Sound familiar? We possess no autograph manuscripts of Spinoza’s philosophical writings (there are a couple of autographs of his letters). And the only philosophical manuscripts we do have are the two Dutch manuscripts of the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, both discovered in the nineteenth century but one of which almost certainly was composed in Spinoza’s lifetime from a Latin original. Thus, to discover a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript copy of the Ethics, even if it is not an autograph, is exciting news indeed. Since it was in the Vatican’s possession by September 1677, we know that it was written out while Spinoza (who had died only a few months earlier) was still alive; it may also be that, while the manuscript is not by Spinoza’s hand, he did look it over. What makes this last possibility even more likely is the fact that, as Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro—the discoverers of the manuscript—argue in their introduction to this volume, the manuscript may originally have belonged to a member of Spinoza’s circle of friends in Amsterdam, Walter Ehrefried von Tschirnhaus. Tschirnhaus was in Paris by 1676, and had in his possession a copy of the Ethics (which a suspicious Spinoza famously told him not to show to Leibniz, who was also in Paris at the time and wanted to have a look at the work). Tschirnhaus was in Rome within a year, where, Spruit and Totaro suggest, he may have made the acquaintance of Niels Stensen, erstwhile Lutheran scientist and friend of Spinoza, now a fervent Catholic convert and anti-Spinozist soon to be appointed Vicar Apostolic of Nordic Missions. Tschirnhaus, or possibly some other “Lutheran foreigner” (in Stensen’s words) to whom he, eager to spread the good word of Spinozism, had given the manuscript, passed it on to Stensen, who in turn handed it over to the Roman Inquisition, along with a denunciation of its author. Stensen’s intention was to have Spinoza condemned by the Church and his works placed on the Index. Spruit and Totaro also claim—on the basis of the handwriting—that the copyist of this manuscript is Pieter van Gent, a member of Spinoza’s circle who played a role in the posthumous publication of his works. While Spruit and Totaro wisely admit that this story behind the manuscript “cannot be established with certainty,” they also say that it is “rather likely.” Their plausible hypothetical reconstruction of the history of the manuscript and of its relationship to the publication history of the Ethics, as well as their account of other important contextual elements, is based on careful and informed scholarship, and makes for fascinating reading. As for the manuscript itself, it is not a revolutionary discovery (as, say, the discovery of the Short Treatise manuscripts were). It will not affect the reading of the Ethics in any major way. There are a variety of discrepancies between the Vatican manuscript and the text of the Ethics in the Opera Posthuma (OP) of 1678: differences in spelling, “rather insignificant” omissions and additions of words and phrases, probable scribal errors, changes in word order, and some noticeable differences in expression. To take just one nonetheless interesting example, the final clause of the...

Evolution of an Edition, Part 3: A Missing Link in the Case of Beethoven's Opus 2

In the 9 March 1796 issue of the Wiener Zeitung , Artaria & Co. announced the publication of Beethoven's latest works, the three Sonatas for Piano, op. 2. Beethoven had completed the sonatas by the early autumn of 1795, but they did not appear in print until March of 1796, while Beethoven was away from Vienna on an extended concert tour. The new sonatas proved to be a challenge for the original publisher, whose first edition is full of errors. How then could Artaria so boldly claim in its announcement that the edition benefited from "the greatest possible attention to beauty and accuracy"? The evidence of Artaria's diligence resides in the existence of multiple proof copies of the edition, each containing handwritten corrections and instructions for revising the music plates. One of these proof copies, which was purchased at Sotheby's auction in 2009 by private collector Matthew Malerich, represents the earliest extant state of the edition, engraved from an autograph manuscript that is now lost. It shows numerous corrections that were likely supervised by Beethoven and possibly marked in his hand. The purpose of this addendum to my previous article, "Punches, Proofs, and Printings: The Seven States of Artaria's First Edition" ( Notes 57, no. 2 [December 2000]: 289-329) is to describe and compare this newly discovered source to other proof copies located in San José, California, and Berlin. The three edited proof copies provide uncommon documentation of the earliest stages of the publication process. By tracking the amendments to the Malerich copy and its descendents, we may gain a better understanding of the collaboration between composers, proofreaders, and engravers in the publication of new music at the end of the eighteenth century.

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n:Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff , and: "Ein förmlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus". Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musikalischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (review)

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n: Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff. Edited by Paul Corneilson and Peter Wollny. Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein, 2010. [xiv, 234 p. ISBN 9780981985015. $50.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Ein formlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus. Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musik - alischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. By Peter Wollny. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Bach-Rezeption, Bd. 2.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 2010. [145 p. ISBN 9783765103902. i24.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. The volume Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n (He is the father, we are the boys) takes its title from a statement allegedly made in 1789 by Mozart to Johann Fried - rich Doles, cantor at Leipzig's St. Thomas church, in reference to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. However, the title clearly serves a dual purpose, as the present volume serves as a Festschrift for Christoph Wolff, the highly influential scholar of the music of Bach, his sons, and, others, on the occasion of Wolff's seventieth birthday. Though lacking what would have been a valuable bibliography of Wolff's extensive scholarship, the volume is adorned with other equally reverential set pieces: a dedicatory acrostic poem by Lisa DeSiro and a closing musical tribute by Robert D. Levin. The main body of the volume consists of ten separately authored chapters, of which five are in German and five in English, focusing primarily on aspects of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's compositional thinking. In the first chapter, Uwe Wolf presents specific details of the revisions made by C. P. E. Bach in the autograph manuscript of J. S. Bach's B-minor Mass, BWV 232. In clarifying the stages of the revisions, Wolf offers information useful to the understanding of the text that appears in that manuscript, which has appeared in several facsimile editions and is available in a high-resolution scan online (available at http://www.bach-digital.de/receive /BachDigitalSource_source_00001048, accessed 15 September 2011) as well as a means toward understanding the editorial decisions that one encounters in the numerous editions of the B-minor Mass. Darrell M. Berg's article treats the process of melodic variation in C. P. E. Bach's music, examining the utilization of this technique in his formal structures and considering the resulting pieces in the context of late eighteenth-century instrumental forms. Laura Buch discusses the closely allied notion of improvisation as manifest in Bach's trios. In this she addresses both simple embellishment and the effect on the trio genre of the increasing significance of the keyboard part. Ulrich Leisinger's contribution examines musical declamation as exhibited in Bach's text setting, which, as with the previous chapters, situates Bach within the transition between baroque and modern styles. Peter Wollny's chapter on the Easter cantata Gott hat den Herrn auferwecket examines the documents associated with that compostion, in a manner which Wollny has perfected, in elucidating biographical details of the composer's professional ambitions. Paul Corneilson reviews the music composed by Bach for Johann Heinrich Michel as a means of examining the parameters in which Bach worked in composing for his Hamburg soloists while also providing musical insight into the biography of Bach's primary Hamburg copyist. Jason B. Grant describes the depiction of the the city of Hamburg in four occassional works by C. P. E. Bach which reference the city and specific sites in the city, providing insight into its citizens' attitudes toward it. Wolfram Ensslin and Tobias Rimek examine his use of pastiche and arrangements of pre-existing music as demonstrated in the chorale settings in the composer's vocal works, providing among other copious details a 25-page index of chorales and their source attributions. Christine Blanken provides valuable details of the reception of C. …