European Composers Research Articles

Calling on the composer: a guide to European composer houses and museums

Across Europe, more than three hundred houses and museums commemorate the composers who lived and worked in them. In Calling on the Composer, two distinguished musicologists guide the musically curious traveler or reader to these sites and provide essential information on their content and significance. Whether lakeside hut or moated castle, clock tower or cave, village school or fine town house, the physical context for musical genius and the artefacts of day-to-day existence have a powerful impact on how we perceive the figure behind the music we know and love. Julie and Stanley Sadie have journeyed to thirty-one countries to compile this unique travel companion and reference source. They offer practical information for the visitor, seasoned insights, and lively commentary. Richly illustrated and supported by thorough maps, the entries on individual composers trace their steps through the practicalities of life and reveal to us the context of creativity.

Flores Jessaei (1606); Florum Jessaeorum (1607), and: Flosculus vernalis (1621), and: Harmonia concertans (1623) (review)

Reviewed by: Flores Jessaei (1606); Florum Jessaeorum, and: Flosculus vernalis, and: Harmonia concertans Alexander J. Fisher Daniel Lagkhner. Flores Jessaei (1606); Florum Jessaeorum (1607). Transcription and revision by Jože Sivec. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti, Znanstvenoraziskovalni center SAZU, Muzikološki inštitut, 1998. (Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae, 34.) [Introd., editorial notes in Slov., Eng., p. ix–xvi; facsims., p. xvii–xx; score, p. 1–56. ISMN M-709004-00-3. €23.] Gabrijel Plavec [Gabriel Plautzius]. Flosculus vernalis (1621). Transcription and revision by Tomaž Faganel. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti, Znanstvenoraziskovalni center SAZU, Muzikološki inštitut, 1997. (Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae, 33.) [Introd., editorial notes in Slov., Eng., p. ix–xix; facsims., p. xx–xxiii; score, p. 1–317. ISMN M-709004-03-4. €102.50.] Isaac Posch. Harmonia concertans (1623). Transcription and revision by Metoda Kokole. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti, Znanstvenoraziskovalni center SAZU, Muzikološki inštitut, 1998. (Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae, 35.) [Editorial notes, texts of compositions with translations in Slov., Eng., p. ix–xlii; facsims., p. xliii–xlvi; score, p. 1–162. ISMN M-709004-04-1. €52.] Since 1983, the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences has made available a valuable cross-section of early modern musical repertory from Slovenia in its series Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae. The bulk of the existing volumes are devoted to a complete edition of the works of Jacobus Handl (Gallus, 1550–1591), a leading composer of Latin sacred music in the Hapsburg lands of the late sixteenth century and one whose works enjoyed a wide circulation in manuscript, individual editions, and anthologies (see reviews in Notes by John Kmetz, vol. 52, no. 3 [March 1996]: 1017–20, and Stephen Rose, vol. 58, no. 1 [September 2001]: 183–86). With the publication of these editions we are beginning to come to terms with a significant repertory that historians have long neglected, a consequence, perhaps, of its very suitability for a wide range of potential consumers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Central and eastern European composers' espousal of an international style of polyphonic composition—embracing neither the chorale-based explorations of Protestant Germany nor the most virtuosic, affective aspects of modern Italian music—and their retention of the Latin language have made it difficult to identify this music with any single, national tradition, highly disadvantageous in the age of nationalistic Denkmäler. Furthermore, the lack of a single, dominating musical personality (the prominence of Handl aside) robs the narrative of an organizing principle. Yet the Hapsburg lands produced and nourished a large number of talented composers whose music, if not as [End Page 478] immediately arresting as that of Orlando di Lasso or Heinrich Schütz, is extremely well crafted and worthy of attention by scholars and performers. Of the three collections reviewed here, the music of the Flores Jessaei (Nuremberg: Paul Kauffmann, 1606) and Florum Jessaeorum (Nuremberg: Paul Kauffmann, 1607) by Daniel Lagkhner (Lackner) is the earliest and, not surprisingly, the most retrospective in character. Born in Styria, Lagkhner (after 1550–after 1607) seems to have spent most of his career attached to the Protestant grammar school in Loosdorf, Lower Austria, for which the music of the two publications discussed here was most likely intended. Little is known about the composer's whereabouts after 1607, but he may have left Loosdorf in the wake of Hapsburg re-Catholicization efforts. Lagkhner had already gained some renown through his Soboles musica, published in Nuremberg in 1602 by Abraham Wagenmann, which exhibited a distinctively Venetian handling of vocal groups. Joze Sivec, who edited that collection as volume 2 of the same series in 1983 (second edition, 1995), has turned now to Lagkhner's more modest sacred compositions for domestic and pedagogical contexts. The Flores Jessaei, set mainly to psalm verses, are scored invariably for three voices in a higher register (with cleffing of C1, C2 or C3, and C4) and reveal the influence of the Italian villanella (which Lagkhner acknowledges in his dedication) in their sectional, repeated forms, lively rhythms, and tendency toward homophony. Yet the legacy of the contrapuntal tricinium, long at home in Protestant schools like Lagkhner's, is frequently evident in opening points of imitation...

Puccini and The girl: history and reception of The girl of the golden West

Set in the American during the California Gold Rush, La fanciulla del West marked a significant departure from Giacomo Puccini's previous and best- known works. Puccini and the is the first book to explore this important but often misunderstood opera that became the earliest work by a major European composer to receive an American premiere when it opened at New York's Metropolitan House in 1910. Adapted from American playwright David Belasco's Broadway production, The Girl of the Golden West, Fanciulla was Puccini's most consciously modern work, and its Met debut received mixed reviews. Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis base their account of its creation on previously unknown letters from Puccini to his main librettist, Carlo Zangarini. They mine musical materials, newspaper accounts, and rare photographs and illustrations to tell the full story of this controversial opera. Puccini and the Girl considers the production and reception of Puccini's cowboy opera in the light of contemporary criticism, providing both fascinating insight into its history and a look to the future as its centenary approaches. Engrossing. . . . An eminently readable, ideally direct and information-packed book. William Fregosi, Opera Today

Computer-Assisted Composition at IRCAM: From PatchWork to OpenMusic

In recent years, IRCAM has been exploring and developing software for computer-assisted composition (CAC). These software packages allow composers and musicologists to formalize and experiment with the structures and dynamics of musical languages. The Formes program (Rodet and Cointe 1984), although primarily devoted to the control of sound synthesis, was really a compositional environment with a high-level object-oriented architecture. The Crime environment (Assayag, Castellengo, and Malherbe 1985; Amiot, Assayag, Malherbe, and Riotte 1986) was the first attempt at IRCAM to realize a general CAC environment where the user could define and control abstract musical formalisms. Francis Courtot developed CARLA as an attempt to use a visual programming interface to a Prolog-based logic-programming system (Balaban, Ebcioglu, and Laske 1992). The development of the PatchWork environment, by M. Laurson, J. Duthen, and C. Rueda (Laurson and Duthen 1989; Laurson 1996), was the next stage in the development of CAC programs at IRCAM. The combination of programming simplicity and a highly visual interface in a personal computing concept created an infatuation with PatchWork among European composers with highly diverse musical and aesthetic backgrounds, including Antoine Bonnet, Michel Fano, Brian Ferneyhough, Gerard Grisey, Paavo Heininen, Magnus Lindberg, Claudy Malherbe, Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho, and many others. OpenMusic, designed by G. Assayag and C. Agon (Assayag, Agon, Fineberg, and Hanappe 1997; Agon, Assayag, Delerue, and Rueda 1998), is the most recent IRCAM CAC environment. It is a visual interface to CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System (Steele 1990). Aside from being a superset of PatchWork, it opens new territories by allowing the composer to visually design sophisticated musical object classes. It introduces the maquette concept, which enables high-level control of musical material over time, and it revises the PatchWork visual language in a modern way.

`New Music' between Search for Identity and Autopoiesis

The so-called New Music in Europe after the Second World War was based on the idea of progress, similar to technological progress and related to it, and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing. The ideal of music as autopoiesis, which appeared in the 1950s, became inherent to this development. It supposed a kind of communication on music as a reified object, which opposed music making and listening as communication between partners. Separated from the life-world and conceived as a self-referential system, New Music should represent not only the logical achievement of the historical development of European music, but also the superiority of Western musical thought in the more developed countries (like the USA, France, West Germany) over the music cultures of the world. Therefore, the integral serialism, which should rule the musical composition, became a form of symbolic power within the musical field, in correspondence with similar forms of domination within the economic, political and technological fields. However, some European composers rejected this trend and tried to find an alternative to aestheticism by means of political engagement. For instance, the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-90) explores the dialectic between subject and object, technological development and critique of technology, avant-garde and critique of progress, globalization and anti-imperialistic resistance. In his strategy, in which Gramsci's and Walter Benjamin's thought played an important role, aesthetics became inseparable from politics. His search for identity as a composer transforms the tragedy of listening into an allegory of human condition.

Handel's Messiah: The New Interactive Edition

(European Composers Series.) Interactive CD-ROM for IBM PC and compatibles. Sunhawk Corporation, 1997. $49.95. Requires multimedia PC or compatible, Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0, 16 MB RAM, 3 MB free hard-disk space, MIDI/WAVE sound card (MIDI wave-table sound card recommended), 486/66 DX2 (32-bit) processor (Pentium recommended), double-speed CD-ROM drive, VGA+ display (256 colors; SVGA 1024 x 768 with 65,536 colors recommended), headphones or speakers, mouse, and keyboard; a laser printer is optional but recommended. Previous applications of multimedia technology for music, such as the pioneering Voyager series (of which Robert Winter's treatment of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 led the way), have emphasized instruction and study. Now that access to computer technology and the Internet have become ubiquitous, a new trend geared toward the performer has emerged. Sunhawk Corporation, based in Seattle and founded by former Microsoft software engineers, is attempting to carve a major niche in this market. In addition to providing sheet music, Sunhawk has developed a player that allows the user to manipulate the playback and the display of the music. The product under review represents a major undertaking of this nature on CD-ROM. One has to admire the choice of Handel's Messiah for this treatment, for it is probably the most popular and most frequently performed of all classical choral works. In addition to the numerous performances and sing-alongs each year, excerpts are often performed by amateur church choirs and choral societies, creating a large potential audience for the product. The program consists of four major sections: a foreword by Kenneth Nott of the University of Hartford, a music list and score selection menu, text and sources (which can be exported to a file for printed programs and other purposes), and the Solero viewer that provides the playback and display of the music. Kenneth Nott's brief foreword offers informative historical background on the circumstances surrounding the composition and first performance of Messiah but does not provide detailed analysis. Since the product is geared toward performers, this lack of detail is understandable, but some notes on performance practice (e.g., treatment of appoggiaturas, trills, and dynamics) would have been desirable, especially considering that older editions (ones in the public domain) have been chosen for the onscreen display. The heart of the program is clearly the Music menu. Here one can select individual movements from the music list, determine the type of score to be displayed (vocal, orchestral, autograph, or the 1767 Randall & Abell edition), and add selections to a play list. One can then either play the selected pieces or view/play them using the built-in Solero viewer. Individual movements may be sorted sequentially, alphabetically, or by genre (arias, choruses, recitatives, etc.). It is also possible to play the music selections while the entire program is minimized so that the user can use the computer for other tasks while listening to the music. Vocal and orchestral scores were scanned and then engraved using music editing software; this process allowed Sunhawk to add MIDI files for simultaneous playback and display. The Randall & Abell edition was photographed from the copy in the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, digitized, and then compressed to fit on the CD-ROM. The vocal score used for this product is the Max Spicker edition, which provides no clues for the naive performer on the placement of appoggiaturas. The introduction to the printed edition provides some instruction, but unfortunately the introduction was not reproduced for this CD-ROM. The orchestral score is a reproduction of the Ebenezer Prout edition, which retains some of the instrumentation added by Mozart, including clarinets and horns. The autograph and Randall & Abell scores allow some comparisons to be made with the other editions available on the CD-ROM. …

Donizetti: European Composer

Journal Article Donizetti: European Composer Get access PHILIP GOSSETT PHILIP GOSSETT Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 14, Issue 3, Spring 1998, Pages 11–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/14.3.11 Published: 01 March 1998

Charles Ives and the classical tradition

Although Charles Ives has long been viewed as the quintesssential American composer, he placed himself in the European classical tradition, drew on it heavily for his aesthetic philosophy and musical techniques, and extended it to create something new. This book illuminates Ives's music by comparing it with that of other composers in Europe and the United States. Edited by two Ives scholars, the book begins with essays that examine the influences on Ives of his musical predecessors and concludes with essays that find extensive parallels between Ives and such European contemporaries as Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky, whose music he knew little of not at all, but with whom he shared influences and concerns. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate that even apparently strange or distinctively American aspects of Ives's music - from his penchant for quotation to his juxtaposition of disparate styles - have strong precedents and parallels among European composers. Ives emerges as a composer at home in the classical tradition, engaged in exploring the same issues that confronted composers of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Karel Goeyvaerts: a Belgian Pioneer of Serial, Electronic and Minimal Music

‘From now on, I will accept only Karel Goeyvaerts as my teacher in composition’ exclaimed the young Karlheinz Stockhausen during the famous New Music Summer Courses at Darmstadt in 1951. Goeyvaerts had just explained the very principles of serial organization for which Stockhausen had been searching for some time. In the following years Goeyvaerts 1923–1993) developed those basic principles into variety of composition techniques, and into a stylistic diversity not often encountered in serious music. After having applied serialism to tapegenerated music in the early 1950s and to experimental and aleatoric procedures in the 1960s, Goeyvaerts developed the repetitive element, already couched in some of his serial works, during the 70s and 80s. In his last period, the Belgian composer did not eschew a return to tonality, without however foresaking the core of serial thinking of which he had been the founding father. For many of these tendencies Goeyvaerts was the forerunner; to others he added valuable contributions. Therefore, his artistic legacy should be evaluated against the work of other European avantgarde composers such as Stockhausen or Boulez, or put into perspective by comparing it with the work of his American colleagues such as Babbitt, Carter, Riley or Glass.

Lessons in the Vernacular

Classical music related in some way to vernacular models is, if not a commonplace by now, at the very least nothing new. The fascination early jazz held for classical musicians in the 1920s is one example. One could perhaps point as well to Vaughan Williams's folk-musicinto-the-concert-hall ideals and the nineteenth century's insatiable appetite for sets of variations on popular airs and opera tunes of the day. Even in centuries previous to the nineteenth, European composers found ways of integrating popular elements into their work without going beyond the resources of their respective art music traditions. That may no longer be a possibility. At least from an American perspective, an ever widening gap has opened between the multiplicity of vernacular musics and the increasingly isolated institutions of the classical concert hall. Paradoxically, the effort to bridge that gapalong with other gaps, such as the one separating Western music from others of the world-has become a characteristic feature of new music of the last few decades. Two pieces available on recent recordings offer insight into this effort as it reflects on the relationship between new music and institutions of the musical establishment. Somewhat resembling Berlioz's Le'lio (the sprawling sequel piece to the Symphonie fantastique) crossed with Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, Frank Zappa, and Hooked on Classics, Todd Levin is a composer's selfnarrated odyssey motivated by the question, What kind of music do you write? The text interacts with an aggressively pedestrian orchestral soundtrack of often disorienting and jarring contrasts, most of which is set to a tireless backbeat. Yo Shakespeare is a luxuriant but lean chassis of impulsive rhythmic strata driven by accumulation. It begins soberly but later reveals a more playful side to its personality.

Women & Music: A History

Feminist aesthetics - recovering jouissance - feminist aesthetics and music, Rene Cox Lorraine. Ancient and medieval music - women and music in Greece and Rome, Ann N. Michelini women in music to ca. 1450, J. Michele Edwards. The 15th through the 18th centuries: musical women in early modern Europe, Karin Pendle musical women of the 17th and 18th centuries, Barbara Garvey Jackson. The 19th century and the Great War: European composers and musicians, ca. 1800-1890, Nancy B. Reich European composers and musicians, 1880-1918, Marcia Citron women in American music, 1800-1918 , Adrienne Fried Block Nancy Stewart. Modern music around the globe: contemporary British composers, Catherine Roma composers of modern Europe, the near East, Australia, and New Zealand, Karin Pendle, Robert Zieroff North America since ca. 1920, J. Michele Edwards, Leslie Lassetter American popular music in the 20th century, S. Kay Hoke. Women in the world of music - three approaches: introduction, Robert Whitneey Templeman women and music around the Mediterranean, L. JaFran Jones women in the world of music - Latin America, Robert Whitney Templeman American women in blues and jazz, Michael J. Budds. The special role of women: women's support and encouragement of music and musicians, Linda Whitesitt.

Boulez's Two Cultures: The Post-War European Synthesis and Tradition

Pierre Boulez is typical of a post-war generation of European composers known for its apparent repudiation of tradition, although the synthesis of such composers as Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen can be shown to be firmly rooted in tradition. Tendencies within both Franco-Russian and Austro-German traditions merged in the formation of Boulez's style. This is reflected both in Boulez's first models, Messiaen and Webern, and by his life-long engagement with both Schoenberg's expressionism and the works of Stravinsky's Russian period. Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg had developed a continuous dynamic inflection that Stravinsky, by the 1920s, rejected in his neoclassical works. Boulez's generation reintegrated these tendencies within the absolutely smooth continuums to be found in many of their works. In Boulez's mature works, there is a continuous system of smoothly planing dynamics. No longer expressive inflection, these dynamics exhibit the clean objective character of Stravinsky's discrete dynamic planes. This dynamic continuum was crucial in creating the continuous through-composed forms of Boulez and Stockhausen. Boulez's rhythmic structures are ultimately rooted in Stravinsky's motor rhythms and Schoenberg's prose rhythms, an opposition he has exploited in many works. Schoenberg's and Stravinsky's essentially neutral tonal space furnished the background for the post-war European harmonic language in which harmonic tensions are diffused both by spacious effects of register and by the continuously graded dynamics. The floating stasis projected in Boulez's mature works is as much a culmination of certain trends within the French harmonic tradition as a natural development within the history of atonality. With the post-war generation in Europe, the French harmonic tradition enjoyed unprecedented influence.

Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century School Music Program

This article describes the development of Louisville public school music from its establishment in 1844 to its suspension in 1879. Rationales for music's introduction, debates over teaching methods, and choices of music curricula are examined within the context of Louisville society. Primary sources are used, including minutes and annual reports of the Louisville school board and accounts of mid-nineteenth-century historians. Although Louisville's early school music program had unique aspects, its development for the most part paralleled that of school music programs in other American cities. School board arguments in favor of music instruction focused on music's intellectual, physical, moral, and social benefits to students. Both “rote” and “note” teaching methods were used with success. Music curricula included books and series containing folk songs, songs by the authors of the books, and adaptations of songs by European composers. The music was simple in rhythm, melody, harmony, and form, and song texts were polite and sentimental.

Amy Lowell and the Music of Her Poetry

ALTHOUGH she had no formal training in music, Amy Lowell's sensitive and discerning ear for the rhythms of poetry helped her to hear music in a way usually open only to musicians. Both the analogies to and analyses of music in her poems and prose writings show a profound dedication to the art whose origins were rooted in her own, and several of her poems are highly original in the manner in which they translate music to verse. Between August 1908 and January 1922, Amy Lowell was introduced to new compositions by European and American composers through her relationship with Carl Engel (18831944). Following his training in Strasbourg and Munich, Engel had emigrated to the United States in 1905. He held distinguished posts as editor and advisor at the Boston Music Co., chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, president of music publishing company G. Schirmer, and editor of The Musical Quarterly. An advocate of modern music, Engel wrote essays on several members of the Boston school, including George Whitefield Chadwick and Charles Martin Loeffler. According to her biographer Foster Damon, Lowell met Engel through the actress Madame Abarbanell in 1908. Engel immediately began to introduce Lowell to work in his special areas of expertise, modern French poetry and music. The poetry Lowell soon came to explore on her own, and in 1915 she published Six French Poets. Under Engel's expert tutelage, she also developed a sophisticated, continental taste for contemporary works several decades in advance of their general acceptance by American

The Neonationalist Movement: Origins of Japanese Contemporary Music

OST OF WHAT has been written about Western-style music in Japan has concentrated on the Japanese ability to copy art forms of other cultures and transform them to fit domestic tastes and purposes. Little emphasis has been placed on how successfully postwar composers have formed a variety of national styles through a complicated process of trial and error, lasting almost one hundred years.' Since the first Western-style composition was composed during the Meiji era (1868-1912) in 1897 by Nobuko Koda, there has been a constant flow of information between Europe, Japan, and the United States. Often, Western models were heavily favored over anything Japanese. Prior to the early Showa period (19261989) immediately preceding World War II, the majority of pieces were written in a pedantic style with obvious references to popular European composers. The early piano works of Kosaku Yamada (1886-1965), one of

Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841-1846

spective centered on Europe and the concert hall,' as Richard Crawford has cogently asserted, then Margaret Fuller (1810-50) can serve as an intelligent guide to its early period. An eminent literary critic who was an intermediary of German, Italian, and French works for American readers, she also enthusiastically championed music through concert notices and reviews of biographies of European composers written for journals and the press of the 1840s. Her thought on musical matters has received some attention in studies2 connecting her to the New England Transcendentalists, but the full range of her writings, with emphasis on the important New York years, has not been considered from this perspective. Although she was not a professional musician or music critic, Fuller wrote seven entries on music, including an important essay on composers, from 1840 to 1844 for the Dial,3 the major journal of the Transcendentalists, which she edited during its first two years of publication. She also wrote at least twenty-nine articles on musical topics for the New-York Tribune,4 the influential newspaper for which she served as the first literary critic from 1844 to 1846. She described concerts and books on music in the years before William Henry Fry assumed the post of music critic for the Tribune on his return from Europe to America in 1852 and before (John Sullivan) Dwight's Journal of Music was established that same year. In such positions of importance

A logic of coherence and an aesthetic of contingency: European versus American “open structure” music

Abstract This paper discusses the features that distinguish European “open form” composition of the 1950s from the contemporaneous “chance procedure” music in the USA: its roots in the history of music and ideas, its overdetermination, its aesthetic status in maintaining the individual work identity, and its philosophic status as a representation of an ultimately fixed and knowable reality. Obviously, the term “open structure” has manifold meanings. It is being used indiscriminately, e.g., for designating both the open work aleatorics introduced within serialist compositional practice by European composers in the nineteenfifties and the workings of chance procedures as proposed by composers in the USA at about the same period. It is my contention, however, that these European and American variants have hardly anything in common at all, either historically or aesthetically or philosophically.

The Solo Piano Sonata in Early America: Hewitt to Heinrich

The piano sonata achieved great importance in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as exemplified in the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, and Schubert. In the United States, however, sonatas were clearly overshadowed by the greater abundance of more popular genres such as dances, marches, and rondos and variations based on well-known tunes. Like most of this music, sonatas issued by American publishers were directed at the widest possible market--the student and amateur with modest keyboard ability. Whereas important sonatas were written by European composers later in the nineteenth century, they were increasingly overshadowed by one-movement character pieces. In the United States, this trend occurs much earlier. Sonatas by James Hewitt, Benjamin Carr, Rayner Taylor, and John Christopher Moller were issued in the 1790s up to 1809, but American publishers made available only one new American sonata, La Buona Mattina by Anthony Philip Heinrich, within the following twenty years. The only early sonatas of a length and seriousness matching European counterparts were composed by Alexander Reinagle, but these have remained in manuscript until only recently.

Music on records: Bournonville's composers

What sort of music is required for a great ballet? Is it enough that it inspire great choreography, as Minkus and Drigo did for Petipa, or must it be strong enough to survive on its own, like Tchaikovsky's three ballets, Delibes' two-and-a-half, and a number of twentieth century works? Agnes de Mille scorns Adam (Have you ever listened to Giselle, she asks incredulously as part of her standard lecture-demonstration), while praising her colleagues Trude Rittman and Morton Gould. Others raid the symphonic or even chamber repertory in search of masterpieces. A considerable difference of opinion about the muscal level of the scores for Boumonville's ballets was evident at the recent Copenhagen celebrations; some critics expressed great fondness for the music he used and others found it trite and inadequate. One distinguished critic remarked that she found the music an obstacle to a full appreciation of Boumonville's work, while others found it a perfect support for his choreographic invention. Listening to recordings of La Sylphide and A Folk Tale these questions are raised again, although repeated listenings have only reinforced my own fondness for this music and my feeling that it is indeed appropriate for these ballets. But then I am also very fond of the music for Giselle. In the nineteenth century, opera was a musically respectable form and ballet music wasn't. Outside Denmark, not one major central European composer wrote music for the ballet (not counting ballets in operas) between Beethoven's The Creatures of Prometheus of 1801 and Richard Strauss' Josefslegende of 1914, unless one excepts Johann Strauss' Cinderella (1908). This seems especially regretable when one thinks of the many choreographers who have since used Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner,

The Piano Music

With the exceptions of Bartók and Messiaen, modern European composers have not shown a particular preference for the piano as the natural vehicle for major works. It has been left to American composers to continue writing works for the piano with the same confidence as the nineteenth-century masters. The list is impressive, ranging from Ives's extraordinary sonatas to Elliott Carter's fine Concerto, via Piston, Sessions, Barber, Cowell, Foss and Copland. The reasons for this American dominance in modern piano literature are complex, although the purely economic factor, that it is cheaper to perform a piano work than an orchestral one, probably influenced Ives's and Copland's generations. To this must be added the use of the piano in jazz, that peculiarly American phenomenon. Indeed the piano, in its more percussive vein, seems to be the quintessential sonority of American music. Looking at Copland's work we can see that piano sound clearly influences the nature of his orchestrations, as it did Ravel's. Some works began life as piano scores (the ballet Billy the Kid for instance), most of the orchestral works include a piano, and many use typical piano gestures—the opening of El Salón México for example. Conversely Copland's piano writing, like that of Beethoven, is influenced by the sounds of the orchestra, although never to such an extent that it prevents truly pianistic writing. The piano works are brilliantly realized in terms of the instrument and are virtuoso pieces, particularly in their rhythmic and sonorous subtleties.