Contemporary Composers Research Articles

Aram Khachaturian and socialist realism: A reconsideration

Aram Khachaturian remains a neglected figure in scholarship on Soviet music, his work often held as exemplifying Socialist Realism at its most conformist. In this article I suggest that folk music strongly influenced his style well before the imposition of Socialist Realism, and that his musical language and aesthetics have much more in common with those of contemporary composers in the West than has previously been assumed. A central focus of the paper will be to examine the role played by Soviet musicologists in placing questionable critical constructs on Khachaturian?s career and creative achievement.

Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) 2015

Each September, contemporary music enthusiasts, composers, scholars and performers from around Australia migrate toward the Victorian regional city of Bendigo for BIFEM, a remarkable music festival now in its third year. The festival has established itself as an annual event of unparalleled significance in Australia – not only as a forum for the presentation of exciting and little-heard music, but as a gathering of like-minded peers. A high proportion of the audience consists of musicians and composers, so informal conversations between concerts are almost as stimulating as the programmed forums and workshops that take place during the festival. In 2015, over the weekend 4–6 September, almost every work in the programme was an Australian premiere, which gives some further evidence of the importance of the festival to the nation's cultural ecology.

Национальная тематика в камерно-инструментальном творчестве композиторов Бурятии

The author notes that during the recent decades in the music by composers of Buryatia more and more attention is being paid to chamber instrumental genres. This can be explained by the effort of the process of revival of the national Buryat culture, as well as the closeness of chamber music with the traditional folkloristic forms of music making. Aspiring to the creation of a national musical color, composers traverse along different paths: they use genuine folk melodies for their thematic material; they construct original themes on the basis of intonations of Buryat folk music; they base their music on timbres of folk instruments. The article examines the chamber instrumental compositions of contemporary composers of Buryatia: V. Usovich, P. Damiranov, L. Sanzhiyeva and D. Korkina. Several compositions diverse in their genres are chosen for analysis: V. Usovich’s fantasy “Uragshaa!” (“Onwards!”) for the national instrument “khur” and piano and short piano piece “Suburgan” (“Buddhist stupa”); L. Sanzhiyeva’s piano pieces “Shaman”; “Naadan” (“Festivity”) by P. Damiranov and the concert fantasy “Baikal” for 33-string yataga solo. Study of these compositions makes it possible for the author to come up with the following conclusions: composers search for new forms of manifestation of national musical thematicism; the national palette of means of musical expressivity becomes enriched; the national modal foundation of Buryat music – anhemitonic pentatonicism – is combined by composers with various diverse harmonic and contrapuntal techniques; hence, the craft of musical composition perfects itself. Keywords : composers of Buryatia, chamber instrumental genres, yataga, chanza, khur

The Rochester Amateurs and The Fall of the House of Usher

Abstract In 1928 James Sibley Watson, Jr. (former editor of The Dial), and Melville Webber (an art historian) created a silent film based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” in a Rochester, New York, carriage barn. Using published and previously unpublished documents, it is clear that this amateur film was intended to create a new visual adaptation and interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's original story, rich in the modernist ambiguity of the early twentieth century. A member of this creative circle was a young and not very experienced composer, Alec Wilder. He was asked to create a new score for this film, but in the end his inability to perform it adequately and lack of confidence caused it to be suppressed. The rediscovery of Wilder's original avant-garde score provides evidence of how he was able to create a modernist composition to mirror the visual perspective of the film. In the mid-1950s, Wilder, by then a respected composer of popular songs, was approached by one of the actors in the original film, Hildegard Lasell Watson, to write a new score. This, written in his more lyrical and popular classical style and creating a more subtle reading of the film's ambiguities, was synchronized by Dr. Watson to create the authorized version. The film has continued to inspire other contemporary composers, such as Colin Z. Robertson and Iris ter Schiphorst, to create their own interpretations of Watson's and Webber's unique adaptation of Poe's tale.

Philip Glass The Trial, Aberystwyth Arts Centre

Philip Glass is so prolific a composer that it is tempting to wonder whether he has become entrapped by his trademark restlessly repeating patterns. At the age of 77, there is no diminution of his prodigious energy; The Trial brings his tally of operas to some 30 since he first shot to fame – or notoriety – with Einstein on the Beach in 1976. Glass is, in effect, an iconoclast-turned-icon, and he is now by far the most performed contemporary composer of opera on the planet.

Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott, and: Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers by Lyn Cramer (review)

Reviewed by: Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott, and: Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers by Lyn Cramer Jim Williams Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein. By Cott, Jonathan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cloth $24.95. 192 pages. Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers. By Cramer, Lyn. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013. Paper $32.45. 304 pages. A widely accepted assumption in the arts (especially in educational arts) is that the creative process of the artist is often more interesting and insightful than the artistic product itself. Jonathan Cott’s My Dinner With Lenny and Lyn Cramer’s Creating Musical Theatre: Conversations with Broadway Directors and Choreographers both focus on the artist’s journey from the seed of conceptuality to the manifestation of the artistic work just prior to its completion. The interviews by Cramer with established Broadway choreographers and directors mostly explore the stages the artists pass through to gain a foothold in the musical theatre world and their rehearsal techniques as they move toward a Broadway production. In many ways it serves as a “how to” book from the perspective of professional practitioners. In contrast, Cott’s informal interview with Leonard Bernstein elicits an eclectic range of artistic, social, and political topics that demonstrates the breadth of Bernstein’s long career as a conductor, composer, social activist, and cultural icon. The interview is not about Bernstein’s reflections on his oeuvre, but rather a dissection of how he approached his work and the influences that guided him. His voice is very present throughout the interview, giving credence to his statement, “You can reverse time through memory when memory becomes an anticipation of the event remembered, thereby making it into the future. So that when you remember it, it becomes the now” (139). Cott’s Dinner with Lenny is publicized as “the last long interview with Leonard Bernstein,” conducted over the course of twelve consecutive hours in one evening, a year before Bernstein’s death. The interview was supposed to be an eight thousand-word assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, which published excerpts of it in 1990, but Cott’s transcript far exceeded the maximum length. Dinner with Lenny encapsulates the full interview in this slim, but copious book. The transcript balances Bernstein’s energetic combination of charisma and chutzpah with his erudite and perceptive commentaries. Cott is the author of several books and interviews with musicians including Glenn Gould, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. He does not disguise the fact that he is a longtime fan of Bernstein, and the conversation reveals Cott’s own astuteness and education in music theory and history. In his prelude, Cott chronicles Bernstein’s career “high points,” beginning with his transilient national debut on November 14, 1943 as a last-minute substitute to conduct the New York Philharmonic. It was this performance that previewed [End Page 182] Bernstein’s theatrical, passionate, and animated conducting style, which would later provide fodder for those critics who would deride his flamboyant showmanship. Cott briefly recounts Bernstein’s successful televised New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, his 1973 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, his receipt of numerous Grammy and Emmy awards, and his own authoring of five books. In the interview Bernstein is polemical yet humble, opinionated though scholarly on a wide spectrum of topics. At times, the interview is a free-association collage of overlapping subjects and musical events fueled by Bernstein’s chain-smoking, vibrant discourse and supplemented by the glasses of wine and vodka in which both men indulged throughout the course of the evening. Yet the conversation never veers off to sloppy or garrulous banter. Cott’s skill as an interviewer is knowing when to let his subject speak at length and how to pursue follow-up questions in a manner that maintains the informality of casual conversation over drinks and dinner. In this setting Bernstein comes across joyfully loquacious and thoughtful in his evaluations and anecdotes of classical and contemporary composers, his enthusiasm for teaching, and his often self-effacing commentary on his own legacy—not only in music—but also...

LA CREACIÓN MUSICAL DE ROBERTO GERHARD DURANTE EL MAGISTERIO DE ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: NEOCLASICISMO, OCTATONISMO Y ORGANIZACIÓN PROTO-SERIAL (1923-1928)

This thesis studies the impact of Gerhard's acquaintance with Arnold Schoenberg in his music and aesthetic thought of the 1920s. In the first part I examine Gerhard's relationship to Schoenberg's compositional and pedagogical principles, particularly during the period of studies in Vienna and Berlin (1923- 28). Schoenberg's teachings are contextualized with respect to Gerhard's earlier musical education. In the second part I study the transformation of Gerhard's musical language in the period 1921 - 1927. I compare the first Apunt for piano (1921) -composed shortly before moving to Vienna- with three pieces composed for Schoenberg that I consider particularly interesting: the Divertiment for wind instruments (1926), the Andantino for violin, clarinet and piano (ca. 1927) and the first movement of the 1927 string quartet, written as final project of his studies in overt homage to Schoenberg's String Quartet Nr. 2 Op. 10. None of these works has been thoroughly analyzed up to now. My study gives a detailed account of the compositional techniques implemented in these pieces and of the relationships with the music and ideas of Schoenberg. Significant affinities of Gerhard's compositional methods with the music of other 2 contemporary composers such as J. Matthias Hauer, Frederic Mompou, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok are also examined. My analysis explains Gerhard's methods of motivic integration, his use of symmetry and transpositional combination as key constructive determinants, the penchant to octatonic constructions in his harmony, his earliest techniques of serial pitch-class organization, the abundant (and often ironic) allusions to elements from the musical past (particularly from the 17th and 18th centuries) and the ascription of the pieces composed between 1926 and 1928 to neoclassical formalism. The understanding of Gerhard's compositional technique and its transformations during the period of studies with Schoenberg is essential for an adequate comprehension of his mature works and the subsequent developments in his musical language.

Study The Process Of Nostalgia In Simin Behbahani's Poem

Simin behbahani is the contemporary Iranian writer and composer lyric. She is well-known to mima's lyric, due to compose the persian lyric at unique rhymes. Simin behbahani is one of the most impressive and innovative poets in the field of contemporary lyric. She began to poetry since aduitood with composing lyrics and classic and romantic quarapoems, and mostly they were containing lovely contents and female true faith feelings and philan thropic feelings. This essay is a research about nostalgia (grief and being away) in the Simin Behbahani's poem. This subject was considered as one of unconscious behaviors in the pome of Simin Behbahani. After finding the origins and defning this term view to cultures and with help of psychologiec views, then it is refered to reason that made the grief and being away and then the relationship of nostalgia and rememberance was considered. The issue of nostalgia concerning to being away from sweetheart was considered in the part of personal remembrance and the matter of poem lonelinos was considered in the section of collective remembrance with mentioning poetry instances.

Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890) the Founder of Musical Ethnography in Poland

Abstract The article presents the greatest Polish ethnographer, who was also a professionally educated musician. He concentrated his activities on the oral musical culture, still vital in the 19th century but liable to changes. Culture studies by Kolberg concerned mainly rural communities, statistically dominating in those times. He planned to edit 60 volumes geographically covering the first Polish State from before 1772; he managed to print 33 of them in his lifetime and prepare many further anthologies for editing. Up till now, the editorial work is still in progress. The already edited 80 volumes show us an old social culture, folk ceremonies, musical repertoire including ritual singing, songs and instrumental pieces. Kolberg’s printed monument is a source of reflection on the past and can inspire social studies, ethnomusicological research as well as musical ensembles performing traditional ethnic music of peasant origin. The size of Kolberg’s documentation means that a special Institute of Oskar Kolberg had to be established to continue editorial and research work. In spite of his positivistic and empirical attitude, Kolberg still kept a romantic faith in the significance of folk songs and singing for the preservation of national components in cultural consciousness. Simultaneously, he developed a model for structural analysis of popular/folk culture and intended to build a cultural atlas of the country, building on the work of his father, professor of the University of Warsaw, an outstanding cartographer. But the core of Kolberg’s programme, its “planetary centre”, was always music. It was music that gave him the stimulus to interpret the culture of Central-Eastern Europe. To preserve regional diversity, he wrote down more than 20 thousand vocal melodies, song texts and instrumental pieces, paying special attention to variants and ornamentation. For the contemporary composer, Kolberg’s volumes are a useful musical reader. These huge anthologies of elementary but highly integrated musical concepts demonstrate the collective creativity and a fascinating prefiguration of mass culture, still open to symbols and to poetry. Kolberg’s music transcriptions, catching music in the process of performance, should not be treated as unchangeable patterns for copying, but rather as a source that helps understand creativity in traditional oral culture.

Supporting Music Composition with Interactive Paper

This thesis focuses on the design of interactive paper interfaces for supporting musical creation. Music composition has been deeply influenced by the computational power brought by computers but despite the use of software to create new sounds or work with symbolic notation, composers still use paper in their creative process. Interactive paper creates new opportunities for combining expression on paper and computation. However, designing for highly individual creative practitioners who use personal musical representations is challenging. In this thesis, I argue that composers need personal and adaptable structures on paper in which they can express and explore musical ideas. I first present three field studies (Chapter 3) with contemporary composers that examined the use of paper and the computer during the composition process and how linking the two media supports exploration of musical ideas. I then describe a participatory design study that investigates the use of formal musical representations (Chapter 4) for creating new paper interfaces that extend computer-aided composition tools. I introduce Paper Substrates (Chapter 5), interactive paper components that provide modular structures for interacting with personal representations of computer-based musical data. I detail tools that we created to develop paper applications with the Paper Substrates approach. Several examples illustrate the creation of personal structures and musical content that can still be interpreted by computer-aided composition software. I then describe a structured observation study with 12 composers who used Polyphony to compose a short electroacoustic piece (Chapter 6). Polyphony is a unified user interface that integrates interactive paper and electronic user interfaces for composing music. The study allowed us to systematically observe and compare their compositional processes. Finally, I report on a research and creation project with the composer Philippe Leroux during the composition of his piece Quid sit musicus (Chapter 7). Several work sessions with the composer and a musical assistant lead to the design of new paper- based interfaces for generating composition material, synthesizing sounds and controlling the spatialization from handwritten gestures from calligraphic gestures over an old manuscript.

Postmoderne hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang: Werk und Rezeption Alfred Schnittkes im Kontext ost- und mitteleuropäischer Musikdiskurse Edited by Amrei Flechsig and Stefan Weiss (review)

Postmoderne hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang: Werk und Rezeption Alfred Schnittkes im Kontext ost- und mitteleuropaischer Musikdiskurse. Edited by Amrei Flechsig and Stefan Weiss. (Ligaturen: Musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Hochschule fur Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, bd. 6.) Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013. [280 p. ISBN 9783487150154. 48 [euro].] Music examples, illustrations. scholarship is booming, especially in Germany and Russia. Schnittke's star has undeniably waned from its early-1990s peak, when he was the most-recorded contemporary composer, surpassing even Philip Glass. Yet several of his solo instrumental compositions-Cello Sonata no. 1, Stille Naclit, A Paganini, and Suite in the Old Style--have become standard repertoire for violinists, cellists, and pianists. Chamber and orchestral works have also fared well: the Concerto Grosso no. 1 is a staple of the orchestral literature, and the Piano Quintet and String Quartets nos. 2 and 3 are often heard on chamber concerts. Schnittke's historical significance still arouses debate, but it seems fair to say that his concept of polystylism both foreshadowed and still aptly describes our current information-saturated age of sampling and remixing. Since the early 2000s, publications about have been appearing at a rapid clip. A scholarly yearbook called Dedicated to Alfred Schnittke (Alfredu Shnitke posvyashchaetsya), begun in 1999, has recently seen its eighth volume (published by Kompozitor in Moscow). This publication includes reminiscences from former colleagues, articles from established and younger scholars on works by and his contemporaries, and valuable primary source documents, among them selections from Schnittke's correspondence. A complete critical edition of his compositions is also well underway, published by Kompozitor in Saint Petersburg, and set in motion by the late Alexander Ivashkin. But arguably the biggest news in scholarship recently has been the unveiling of sketches and other documents by the composer, now at the Juilliard School in New York. This treasure trove includes materials related to several pivotal works, among them the Symphonies nos. 2 and 3, Passacaglia, Piano Quintet, Dialogue for cello and seven instruments, Lebenslauf, and Faust Cantata (Seid niichtern und wachet). (Ivana Medic gives a useful preliminary digest of these materials in Alfredn Shnitke posvyashchaetsya, no. 8 [Moscow: Kompozitor, 2011], 109-57.) Unfortunately, a number of other scores, among them the manuscript of Peer Gynt, are either in the process of being, or have recently been, sold at auction, destined for whereabouts unknown. This, as always, represents a very real loss to scholarship. The collection of essays called Postmodernism behind the bon Curtain and edited by Amrei Flechsig and Stefan Weiss, both prime movers and shakers in the active Russian musicological scene in Germany, must be evaluated against this backdrop. studies sits on the cusp of a new period. Scholars fluent in both Russian and German (as well as English)--all crucial for researching the composer--have begun approaching the music and digging into historical sources. That Russian music scholarship is going strong in Germany has been demonstrated by a number of important conferences held there over the past several years; the present volume arose from a conference held in Hannover in 2009 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Schnittke's birth. In May 2013, I attended a conference in Hannover organized by Weiss on the theme Soviet Music Abroad (Sowjetische Musik im Ausland), and can attest to its crucial value in bringing together scholars from Russia, Europe, the U.K., and North America. Unfortunately, the present collection includes no representatives from the former U.S.S.R.; their contributions might have greatly balanced its perspective. The collection includes 16 essays, three in English, the remaining in German. …

Winning and Losing in Russian New Music Today

This article examines some of the organizational changes shaping Russian new music from the collapse of the USSR in 1991 to the present and their consequences for composers active in Russia today. The Soviet collapse triggered significant transformations in how new music in Russia is funded, where and by whom it is performed, and how it is promoted and distributed. These developments have affected the opportunities available to contemporary Russian composers, their strategies for career success, and how they envision their place vis-à-vis other composers or within society at large. More significantly, such changes have shaped individual composers' creative practices: as composers moved into new collaborative networks after the Soviet collapse; as the resources at their disposal changed; and as they composed for new performers, markets, or patrons, so, too, did their styles change. In explaining musical developments from an organizational perspective, this article draws upon theories from the sociology of culture literature, in particular Howard Becker's idea of “art worlds” and the production-of-culture perspective developed by Richard Peterson and others. The article also considers factors other than organizational ones affecting Russian music today, including the generational shift presently underway as members of post-Soviet birth cohorts enter the professional ranks.

Centring The Periphery: Local Identity in the Music of Theodore Antoniou and other Twentieth-Century Greek Composers

This study addresses aspects of local identity in the music of Theodore Antoniou and other Greek contemporary composers. It highlights misapprehensions and obsolete conceptions of historiography and aesthetics embedded in the use of terms such as centre and periphery or high- and low-brow styles of music, respectively. An overview of the history of art music in Greece is attempted, for a better understanding of these issues in that context. The parallel reference to significant Western contemporary composers such as György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, and Mauricio Kagel supports the primary argument of the essay, which seeks fair treatment for all places that find themselves peripheral to a given centre. The case of Greece—one of the cradles of Western culture—is a unique example of a problematic approach typical of Western historiographies with regard “centres” and “peripheries” that needs to be corrected.

From the Editor

From the Editor Ricardo D. Trimillos Aloha kākou! Music as performance exists almost entirely in the present, although it often references the past, and sometimes the future. The temporal present also affects our perception and valorization of a specific music genre or work, often subjecting it to extra-musical variables generalized as social context. The present issue 45(1) addresses these two observations in a variety of ways and from a number of perspectives that I hope you find both novel and provocative. Variety also characterizes the diverse genres contained in the four articles, the four book reviews, and the single review essay, which for me collectively encompass the categories of traditional, “evolved traditional,” commercial, and global elitist music. The final category relates to treatments of two contemporary composers, Mayuzumi Toshiro and Chou Wen-Chung (surname first for both). Traditional genres comprise the focus of the article by Roald Maliangkay on South Korea, the review of Edi Nasution’s ethnography on tulila written in Indonesian, and the review of Alan Thrasher’s musical analytical study of sizhu from South China. In the Korean article, the author problematizes a musical present of shamanic genres significantly impacted by a growing conservative Christianity, in effect commenting upon their future. For the Indonesian tradition of tulila, reviewer Lawrence Ross characterizes the genre as marginalized in Indonesian research while marking efforts by an indigenous scholar as significant. Yu Hui’s review of the Thrasher title reinforces the benefits of insider and outsider viewpoints for understanding the sonal underpinnings of sizhu. Adrienne Kaeppler’s term evolved traditional is a convenient descriptor for the music-dance jhummar presented by Gibb Schreffler. A revivalist genre, its present-day perception includes a Punjabi sense of “our culture” in contrast to banghra, which is now globalized and commercialized. In the review of Frederick Lau’s Music in China, Ying Diao notes and problematizes another instance of present-day perceptions of the cultural and geographical regarding music. That commercial music is subject to external factors is almost a truism. However, Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau in his study on rock festivals in China posits a novel symbiotic relationship between musical commercialism and [End Page 1] government at local and national levels. Similarly, Jennifer Milioto Matsue’s review of the Heather MacLachlan title on Burmese pop music suggests another symbiotic relationship between government and a local industry that has no center, functioning largely through individual agency and personal contacts. Elitist art or “serious” music is not a frequent topic in an ethnomusicological publication. Lisa Cook’s consideration of Mayuzumi’s Bunraku for cello considers both the composer and the work within a frame fraught with issues of identity and nationhood—issues that are at once contemporary and retrospective. Her novel treatment of the subject matter speaks to ethnomusicology as an approach applicable to any musical expression. On occasion Asian Music offers a review essay, in this issue a comparison of two titles about Chou Wen-Chung, a US-based composer of elitist art music active during the difficult era of post-1949 China-US relations. Reviewer John Winzenburg interrogates Chou’s cultural and musical “Chineseness” as presented in the two studies and notes their lack of attention to the composer’s cultural and musical “Americanness.” He approaches both works as ethnomusicological texts, although they would probably be more generally regarded as part of a “new musicology” trajectory. The journal continues to encourage greater diversity of voices. Noteworthy are the reviews by Yu on Thrasher’s study of sizhu and by Ross on Nasution’s treatment of tulila, a title published in Indonesian. The Ross review thus provides the non-reader of Indonesian some access to current indigenous research. We also note the significant presence of heritage scholars in the field, for example, titles by Chang, Lai, and Lau reviewed in this issue. However, diversity need not be defined exclusively by nationality or ethnicity—Groenewegen-Lau writes as an active performer and cultural worker in China’s rock scene. Finally, a number of contributors locate their careers in the Asia region, including Groenewegen-Lau, Ross, Winzenburg, and Yu. The study of Asian music continues to grow and expand; domains, definitions, and approaches are being...

Apokalipsa św. Jana w trzech interpretacjach muzycznych kompozytorów współczesnych Pomorza i Kujaw

Apokalipsa św. Jana w trzech interpretacjach muzycznych kompozytorów współczesnych Pomorza i Kujaw

Aldeburgh Festival 2013: Judith Weir, Sally Beamish, Charlotte Bray, Anna Meredith, Thea Musgrave, Jonathan Harvey

In Benjamin Britten's centenary year, the music of its founding father featured widely at the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival. However, there was also a strong showing of music by contemporary composers, including six new pieces for different ensembles co-commissioned by the Britten–Pears Foundation and the Royal Philharmonic Society to mark the bicentenary of the foundation of the RPS, as well as Britten's hundredth anniversary.

Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers by Helen Abbott

Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Abbott, Helen. Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0805-2. Pp. 215. 8 musical scores. $64.95. Abbott investigates how poetry is transformed when it encounters music. She appropriately selects the latter half of the nineteenth century in France as a particularly fecund period for cross-pollination among the arts. Within that vast domain, she focuses on the clash between the artistic expectations raised when the popular intermingles with the formal. Using the Microcosm approach, she studies Baudelaire’s “La mort des amants”(first published in his eleven-verse Limbes of 1851), five musical settings of that poem for voice and piano by contemporary composers, and an obscene parody by two of the Vilains Bonshommes, Paul Verlaine and Léon Valade. Focusing on time, place, and performance (including reading aloud as well as singing and accompanying ), Abbott shows how poets and musicians struggled to define and to embody “musicality” in words, and lyricism in music. She writes elegantly and clearly, knows the mélodie (art song) and chanson (popular song) traditions well, and has conducted thorough research into recent scholarship about Baudelaire. Of particular interest are Abbott’s discussions of how sounds, rhythms, and images in poetry can reflect a struggle between routine and innovation (9). She demonstrates how Berlioz’s music does the same with Gautier’s verse (21–22). Note also her survey of Villiers’ relationship to Baudelaire’s work, which led to the former’s abandoning poetry (14–17). Her analysis of how “La mort des amants” itself resists closure is valuable (22–29). She keenly observes that a poem about dying can become transformed into a resurrection when it is set to music, and even more so when that music is performed (41). Nothing innovative here, of course—dirges, requiem masses, Gibbons’s“The Silver Swan,”arias such as Gluck’s“Che faró senza Euridice”demonstrate abundantly that the mournful effervescence of Symbolism merely revives an ancient tradition, as do the “Farewell Tours” of many popular musical groups today. Chapter 3, on “Musical Theories,” is weak, confusing sound with spelling when characterizing rhymes, missing many patterns of sound repetition while arbitrarily privileging others, and unfortunately succumbing to the Pathetic Fallacy when saying “the intensity of these sounds” (61), where “density” would have been much better (moreover, “intensity” is a technical musical term for“loudness”). Chapter 4,“Song,”begins with an interesting discussion of word history (65–67). In what follows, no account is taken of many prominent rhythmic features: internal divisions such as coupes secondaires in alexandrine verse, of free divisions (ranging from 1+7 to 7+1) in the octosyllable, of the expressive effects of vers impairs, of melisma and ornament in vocal lines, or of the ad lib treatment of the e caduc (better called “weak” than “mute” e) in popular songs. We never come to understand why the five settings for “La mort des Amants” are of musical interest 246 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 247 (even Debussy’s, superior to the others, dates from his early period, and harmonically depends mainly on the Circle of Fifths). The final two chapters, however, on“Parody” and “Legacy,” are perceptive, and reveal Abbott as a promising cultural historian. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Binet, Laurent. Rien ne se passe comme prévu. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 978-2246 -79933-7. Pp. 308. 17 a. Binet continues a tradition of “embedded journalism”in a presidential campaign started by Yasmina Reza, who shadowed Sarkozy in 2007, as chronicled in L’aube le soir ou la nuit (Flammarion, 2007). For this book, Binet shadowed François Hollande during the 2012 campaign. Reza had a subject who provided her with amusing details in 2007; she described Sarkozy in his Ray-Ban sunglasses as “Joe Pesci dans une ruelle de Palerme.” Sarkozy’s pronunciation of “joint-venture” came out as “John Ventura.” Binet’s subject is much less colorful, providing fewer anecdotes, more impénétrable than Sarkozy, plus lisse. The title of the book is taken from a statement that Hollande made, captured in a Canal+ documentary, following Strauss-Kahn’s...

Jacques Hétu's <em>Style Composite</em>: A Transformational Approach to Modal Superimposition

JACQUES HÉTU’S STYLE COMPOSITE: A TRANSFORMATIONAL APPROACH TO MODAL SUPERIMPOSITION STEPHANIE LIND ACQUES HÉTU (1938–2010) HAS BEEN one of Canada’s most performed contemporary composers; particularly renowned for his commissions, his music has been performed by artists including the Canadian pianists Robert Silverman and Glenn Gould (who recorded the Variations for Piano, op. 8), Canadian-born clarinettist James Campbell, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. Stylistically, he is known for “a composite language largely branded by octatonicism, but also by chromaticism, a language where melodic units play a fundamental role.”1 J 136 Perspectives of New Music Among other stylistic features, Hétu’s music frequently employs Messiaen’s “modes of limited transposition.” While Messiaen refers to these collections as ‘modes,’ he admits that they “have nothing in common with the three large modal systems of India, China, and ancient Greece, nor with the modes of plainchant,”2 nor do they suggest traditional modality or tonality. Rather, they are part of a larger collection of sets featuring Tn symmetry. The modes of limited transposition and their relation to this larger collection of sets can be seen in Robert Morris’s “Transposition Invariance Inclusion Lattice,” given in Example 1.3 Although Tn symmetry is, in many ways, a better descriptor for this collection of sets (particularly since several of the other Tn-symmetrical EXAMPLE 1: MORRIS’ TRANSPOSITION INVARIANCE INCLUSION LATTICE. MESSIAENS’S “MODES OF LIMITED TRANSPORTATION” GIVEN BY ROMAN NUMERALS Reprinted by permission of Robert Morris Jacques Hétu's Style Composite 137 sets listed in Example 1 will appear in the course of this analysis), Messiaen uses the term “mode” to refer to these seven collections because to him they suggest “a modal atmosphere of several keys occurring simultaneously, without polytonality.”4 In order to emphasize Hétu’s stylistic connection to Messiaen, I will thus employ the term ‘modes of limited transposition’ throughout this paper, but will refer to their Tn symmetry in cases where this property is particularly relevant to the musical structure. I will be labeling these collections with Messiaen’s own convention of a regular-case numeral indicating the mode type and a superscript numeral indicating a particular transposition of the mode.5 Other elements in Hétu’s music that suggest the influence of Messiaen include the repetition of short motives and the superimposition of independent melodic layers. Such similarities are not surprising given that Hétu was both a first- and second-generation student of the French composer: he studied with Clermont Pépin (a former student of Messiaen) from 1956–61 at the Conservatoire de musique à Montréal, and with Messiaen himself in Paris from 1962–63 as a result of winning the Prix d’Europe in 1961.6 Hétu was well aware of Messiaen’s impact; for example, in describing his Variations for Piano (1964) he stated: I believe in the possible existence of a style encompassing several systems. A brief analysis of a fragment from one of my works will illustrate and clarify my thoughts. The first four measures of my Variations for piano [Example 2] state, in a contracted manner, the essential elements which generate the entire work. . . . First, the theme: Its declaration presents the twelve tones of the chromatic scale but only the first six will have a structural function. . . . Secondly, the harmony: the chords are constructed from a mode previously catalogued by Olivier Messiaen. . . . [T]here is a relationship between this mode and the theme: the last six notes of the latter are also part of the mode. The contrapuntal aspect of this passage is characterized by the imitative treatment of these two sonic planes.7 The elements identified by Hétu—multiple overlapping “sonic planes” (that is, textural superimposition), “harmony” derived from Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, and a structural relationship between the organization of the underlying mode and the main thematic material—recur throughout much of his music. Deriving melodic and harmonic elements from a Messiaen-inspired modal framework can thus be considered a key component of his compositional style. 138 Perspectives of New Music This paper will...

Carl Nielsen and his Organ Preludes in the Context of Hans Henny Jahnn, Hugo Distler and Ernst Pepping

In summer 1931 a correspondence between Carl Nielsen and the German author Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) started. Jahnn was organ builder and publisher of music in unison. He knew the 29 little preludes and the Commotio op. 58 for organ, Nielsen had sent him. He was willing to publish them for Germany. Because of Nielsen’s death at the beginning of October 1931 this plan failed. Jahnn, as an organ builder one of the masterminds of german organ movement and an expert in organ music of the baroque, refused to accept any other contemporary composers than Strawinsky and Nielsen. Likely because of their close relationship to baroque compositions. Therefore Nielsen would have been the only contemporary in Jahnns publishing programme – besides masters of the baroque. Jahnn was fascinated by Nielsen’s anti-romantic position, which used to be also an essential part of the organ movement. For that reason it’s natural to compare Nielsens 29 little preludes, published in Copenhagen in 1930, to commensurable works of younger composers in conjunction with the organ movement. Good examples are the Kleine Orgelchoral-Bearbeitungen op. 8/3 (1938) by Hugo Distler (1908-1942) and the Kleine Orgelbuch (1941) by Ernst Pepping (1901-1981). In spite of the fact that their personal style is very different, there are interesting congruities to be found in their works: strong composition of form, transparent and reverts partially to modal elements. These correspondences testify in no case an influence on another. It’s rather an example for a kind of climate that crosses/oversteps borders – this kind of climate that includes as well the organ movement and the composers close to it.

How to Make a 'Volkslied': Early Models in the Songs of Johannes Brahms

Matthew Gelbart’s recent volume, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner , demonstrates that ‘folk music and art music are not timeless, objective truths, but very human constructions’. This article argues that even after the concepts of folk music and art music had emerged, figures like Johannes Brahms shaped an individual understanding of folk music that diverged from the prevailing view. Brahms’s concept of folksong is explored first through the prism of Gelbart’s parameters: authorship, origin, function, and transmission, and is interpreted as a late echo of Johann Gottfried Herder’s thinking from the late 1770s. Attention is then shifted to Brahms’s earliest songs in a folk style from the 1850s, in which the influence of his love of earlier music is strongly evident, resulting in a different musical style from contemporary folksong collectors and composers such as Ludwig Erk and Friedrich Silcher. The poet Ludwig Uhland’s approach to medieval folk poetry can be read as an important literary precedent for Brahms’s folksong construct. Ultimately, Brahms’s conception and use of folksong mutated over the following decades; this is interpreted as a consequence of his growing awareness of his middle-class public, thus leaving only a folk ‘trace’ in his song-writing style.