Hallelujah Chorus Research Articles

Artamonova , E. A. Lukina , G. U. Tabachnikova , O. M. Russian-British Intercultural Dialogue: Russian Music in Britain (review)

REVIEWS 753 All in all, it is extremely disheartening that such a worthwhile project based on a wealth of research material has been handled in such a way as to be so much less rewarding than anticipated. London Nick Worrall Artamonova, E. A., Lukina, G. U. and Tabachnikova, O. M. (eds). RussianBritish Intercultural Dialogue: Russian Music in Britain — British Music in Russia / Rossiisko-britanskii kul´turnyi dialog: russkaia muzyka v Velikobritanii — britanskaia muzyka v Rossii. Gosudarstvennyi institut iskusstvoznaniia and the University of Central Lancashire, Moscow, 2020. 447 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Price unknown. This handsomely produced volume on British-Russian musical relations derives from what must have been a most stimulating conference held in the State Institute of Art Studies in Moscow and the Music Department of the University of Central Lancashire, as part of the Russian-British year of music in 2019. The team of contributors comprises approximately twice as many Russians (whether or not they still live in that country) as others, and for that reason the main, although very far from only, readership may be of those with Russian. The book is in five parts, 1: Historical Comprehension of Russian-British Cultural Dialogue (Interviews and Meetings); 2: Creative Heritage of Russian and British Musicians in the Cultural Life of the Twentieth and Early TwentyFirst Centuries; 3: Russian Musicians in England and English Musicians in Russia; 4: Historical Evidence for Russian-British Cultural Interaction; 5: Artistic Facets in the Cultural Crossover: Music, Literature, Theatre. It ends with brief notes about the authors with portraits, substantial abstracts of their contributions as well as keywords, all in both Russian and English. The interviews and reminiscences of Part 1 are fascinating, ranging from Britten to Iudina, with some typically lively anecdotes surrounding Rostropovich (including his practising obeisance in a quiet churchyard in expectation of a meeting with Princess Mary in Harewood House). Also entertaining is Elizabeth Wilson’s account of her stay in Russia (where early on she was sternly informed that Handel was not only not English, but also a socialist, the proof being the Hallelujah Chorus, which demonstrated conclusively that the workers were joyful). In Part 2 there are two articles about a man who epitomized musical links between Russia and the West, the late Professor Aleksandr Ivashkin: by Ol´ga Tabachnikova in a Russian translation of an article first published in English, and by his pupil, Elena SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 754 Artamonova, who writes of a dialogue of cultures, revealing many aspects of this remarkable man; she also contributes an interesting article based on recent archival findings and publications relating to musical links between the countries during World War Two and the Thaw. Viktoria Zora writes about the musical exchanges of the 1940s, while Rustem Kudoiarov considers Britten’s Piano Concerto and its creative connections with Soviet Russia, a land with which Alan Bush (as Amrei Fleichsig reminds us) had political as well as cultural sympathies. Finally in this section, Paolo Eustachi writes about Michael Nyman, who wrote music for Dziga Vertov’s silent film, Man with a Movie Camera. The latter article is only in English, as are Vladimir Marchenko’s piece on Tarkovskii’s production of Boris Godunov as an artistic credo, and Caitlin Smith’s on the merits of Brodkii’s rather than Auer’s version of Chaikovskii’s Violin Concerto. Many more contributions are only in Russian, except those by Vladimir Jurowski and Gerard McBurney reviewing musical connections between Britain and Russia, violist Martin Outram’s interview, which touches particularly on the interest of Bax and MacMillan in Russia but where he speaks mainly about Peter Maxwell Davies, and, thirdly, Jane Hanson’s recollections of working with Evgenii Svetlanov. All these are published in both languages. Unfortunately, the interview with Aleksandr Vustin and Elizabeth Wilson is only in English. Part 3 on musicians visiting each other’s countries include Elena Dolinskaia, who adds some details to our knowledge of Medtner in Britain; pianist and composer Ivan Sokolov reminisces about his connections with this country; and Svetlana Lashchenko writes about the disastrous visit to Russia of the otherwise successful prima donna Clara Novello in 1839. Part 4 begins with George Lapshynov (De...

Summa Anti‐Theologica

Summa Anti‐Theologica Peter Heinegg This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. By Martin Hägglund (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2019), 450pp. $29.95. Despite the fairly widespread readership of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.), they have also been widely panned in Academe as crude, arrogant, and superficial. In any case, the debate over their position has been muddled by the fact that most of them, save for Daniel Dennett, are non‐philosophers, and their opponents have frequently been slow‐moving targets like televangelists and right‐wing Evangelicals. Martin Hägglund isn't, technically speaking, a philosopher either, but a Swedish‐born professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale, who has not only read his way through the corpus of western European philosophy, but doesn't hesitate to quarrel with major figures like Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, when he catches them in inconsistencies or failing to take their own positions to the logical limit. His book is a dense, passionate, fiercely abstract case for atheism, but it scores its points more against religion as traditionally defined than as concretely lived. The key word in Hägglund's argument is “secular,” meaning of this world, finite, evanescent, death‐bound, fragile (and, he might have added, tragic). Religion for him comprises every kind of doomed attempt to escape the secular. He defines it as “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of timeless repose (such as nirvana, a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.”) Cue John Lennon singing “Imagine.” Hägglund goes to work, deconstructing and devastating any mode of such notions, because on close inspection they're unthinkable, incoherent, and futile exercises in mental gymnastics. If we were somehow freed from time, we'd have no shape or identity, no past, present, or future, no story, no goals, no relationships, and on and on. We'd be trapped in a shapeless, colorless ether that could neither be perceived, grasped, or moved in any direction. If we could completely achieve the Stoic ideal of apathia (total painlessness and emotional quiescence) or Buddhist nirvana, we would no longer be human. So, are religious people deceiving themselves, or just hopelessly sloppy thinkers? (What would a daily schedule in Paradise look like?) Hägglund suggests believers don't literally mean their blissful term “forever”; it's just a very long time or on and on. (How could you talk meaningfully about something you've never experienced and can't really explain?) He doesn't bother to address the juridically impossible problem of eternal Hell for time‐bound evil acts. And Hägglund seems to ignore the curious paucity of details supplied about the afterlife in the New Testament, which has much to say about Judgment and separating the righteous and wicked, but precious little about what happens next. Is it an accident that St. Paul, who was never at a loss for words, wound up describing the next world so vaguely: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2.9—and half that line was borrowed from Is. 64.4). There are, of course, graphic images of heaven as a city made of jewels, the New Jerusalem, at the end of the Book of Revelation; and the Qur'an paints sensuous pictures of Jannah; but these are mythic fantasies and tell us nothing about Hägglund's chief preoccupation: time. It's easy enough to depict scenes of thunderous celebration (the Hallelujah chorus), but in the only world we know these moments are always followed by the return to gray everydayness. So, perhaps believers are a kind of absurdists, who refuse to accept the world and life as they are, and chase after transcendent visions that they know, at some level anyhow, are blind leaps of faith. More to the point, they ignore rigid theological constructs (the geometry of faith) and embrace its poetry instead. In other words, believers probably care a lot less about eternity than Hägglund thinks they do. In classic existentialist fashion, Hägglund says the...

“But Amen is the Price:” James Baldwin and Ray Charles in “The Hallelujah Chorus”

Based on a recent, archival discovery of the script, “But Amen is the Price” is the first substantive writing about James Baldwin’s collaboration with Ray Charles, Cicely Tyson, and others in a performance of musical and dramatic pieces. Titled by Baldwin, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was performed in two shows at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 1 July 1973. The essay explores how the script and presentation of the material, at least in Baldwin’s mind, represented a call for people to more fully involve themselves in their own and in each other’s lives. In lyrical interludes and dramatic excerpts from his classic work, “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin addressed divisions between neighbors, brothers, and strangers, as well as people’s dissociations from themselves in contemporary American life. In solo and ensemble songs, both instrumental and vocal, Ray Charles’s music evinced an alternative to the tradition of Americans’ evasion of each other. Charles’s sound meant to signify the history and possibility of people’s attainment of presence in intimate, social, and political venues of experience. After situating the performance in Baldwin’s personal life and public worldview at the time and detailing the structure and content of the performance itself, “But Amen is the Price” discusses the largely negative critical response as a symptom faced by much of Baldwin’s other work during the era, responses that attempted to guard “aesthetics” generally—be they literary, dramatic, or musical—as class-blind, race-neutral, and apolitical. The essay presents “The Hallelujah Chorus” as a key moment in Baldwin’s search for a musical/literary form, a way to address, as he put it, “the person and the people,” in open contention with the social and political pressures of the time.

The Spirituality of Africa: The First Encounter

AbstractThe article shows some moving occasions during the first fieldwork of Victor Turner and myself in Africa during the 1950s. For instance, the Ndembu people would always give great welcomes to their returning kin after long absences. The scenes are etched on my mind as a blueprint for all welcomes. On their friends return, the villagers would immediately gather and sing the simple song, “You're back, you're back!” Why did the people so much value each other? In this village I was learning about communitas. The scenes were etched on my mind as a blueprint for all sociality. They were like the Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven's Song of Joy, the Marseillaise, “When the Saints Come Marching In”—many anthems of praise. They were unconditionally directed, the song of what we came to know as communitas. We were intensely interested and enjoyed the rituals just as they did; only they were unfamiliar to us. For the people, they were everything.

Two Versions of C. P. E. Bach's Magnificat

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. (Berlin Version). Edited by Christine Blanken. (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works, ser. V: Choral Music, vol. 1.1.) Los Altos, CA: The Packard Humanities Institute, 2012. [Gen. pref., p. vii-viii; pref.: choral music, p. ix-x; introd., p. xi-xix; libretto, p. xxi; 7 plates; score, p. 3-149; abbrevs., p. 151- 53; crit. report, p. 155-83; appendix, p. 185-200. ISBN 978-1-933280-301. $25.]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. (Hamburg Version). Edited by Christine Blanken. (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works, ser. V: Choral Music, vol. 1.2.) Los Altos, CA: The Packard Humanities Institute, 2012. [Gen. pref., p. vii-viii; pref.: choral music, p. ix-x; introd., p. xi-xix; libretto, p. xxi; 8 plates; score, p. 3-146; abbrevs., p. 147-49; crit. report, p. 151-68. ISBN 978-1-933280-31-8. $25.]Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Magnificat, Wq 215/H 772, was composed in 1749 and apparently performed in a bid for position of Cantor at St. Thomas's in Leipzig, and it proves that Bach was more than ready to fill his father's shoes. Until recent rediscovery of cantata Ich bin vergnugt mit meinem Stande (Wq/H deest), which dates from 1733-34, was for a long time Bach's earliest known choral work. In it, he demonstrates his command of both latest galant idioms and strict counterpoint, concluding a virtuosic fugue on Sicut erat in principio. Yet politics intervened, and Gottlob Harrer, favorite of Dresden Count von Bruhl, was selected over Bach. Still, Leipzig performance must have made quite an impression: a decade later a former St. Thomas School pupil remembered with pleasure splendid and excellent Magnificat performed by Bach (p. xiv; where neither volume is indicated, page number is same in both volumes).In 1786, Bach programed on a benefit concert, alongside Credo from his father's Mass in B Minor and Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. This concert was self-consciously retrospective, containing three works all composed in 1740s. That retained such a prominent position in Bach's repertoire is a testament to his high regard for it. As late as 1806, an anecdote in Leipzig Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung described it as the great by C. P. E. Bach, about which one hears a lot spoken by public (p. xv). While this anecdote is plagued by confused chronology and problematic attribution, its publication nevertheless speaks to high regard in which piece was still held over half a century after its premiere. The was eventually published by Simrock in Bonn, ca. 1830.And yet, previous modern editions of this work are thoroughly inadequate, hobbling its modern-day reception. A vocal score edited by Cor Backers (Hilversum: Harmonia-Uitgave, 1962) claims to be on original manuscript, but in reality is more of an arrangement. A full score edited by Gunter Graulich and Paul Horn (Neuhausen: Hanssler, 1971) is crippled by its inaccurate chronology and failure to take into account original vocal and instrumental parts. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish two distinct versions of piece, since they are combined in a single score, and second setting of Et misericordia is consigned to an appendix.Just in time for 300th anniversary of Bach's birth, we have editions of both Berlin and Hamburg versions of Magnificat, based for first time on scholarly philological criteria (p. xiii), prepared by Christine Blanken. This is no small feat: Bach is well known for his penchant for revision, and presents a special case, virtually unique in Bach's oeuvre, in that it was premiered in either 1749 or (more likely) 1750, and last performed in his lifetime in 1787, a year before his death. The work therefore has a nearly forty-year performance history under composer himself, and corresponding mountain of scores and performing materials to prove it. …

Classical Music as Popular Music

The purpose of this study was to determine which “popular” classical repertoire is familiar and predictable to adolescents. Specifically, the study sought to examine (1) if students had heard the music before, (2) where they had heard the music before, and (3) if they could “name that tune.” Participants ( N = 668) for this study were middle school ( n = 220) and high school ( n = 448) students who listened to 30 classical music excerpts and answered the research questions for each piece. The majority of students (87%) reported previously hearing the music. Students also indicated the various contexts in which they had heard the repertoire, including a number of contemporary media, school music classrooms, and/or live performance situations. Even so, only 50% of the students were able to correctly identify just three of the 30 musical excerpts: Flight of the Bumblebee, Hallelujah Chorus, and Pomp and Circumstance. Further results are discussed in the article.

Rejoicing against Judaism in Handel's Messiah

Scholars have too little investigated questions of religious meaning in Handel's Messiah, particularly the work's manifest theological anti-Judaism. Previously unknown historical sources for the work's libretto compiled and arranged by Charles Jennens (1700–73) reveal the text's implicit designs against Jewish religion. Handel's musical setting powerfully underscores these tendencies of Jennens's libretto and adds to them, reaching a euphoric climax in the Hallelujah chorus. Within its arrangement of juxtaposed Old Testament prophecies and their New Testament fulfillment and with its matching musical styles, Handel's Messiah could hardly have expressed more powerfully its rejoicing against Judaism than by having the ferocious tenor aria “THOU [Jesus] shalt break THEM [the Jews] with a rod of iron” answered by the chorus “Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” The aria is a setting of Psalm 2:9, a passage that was generally and unquestioningly believed among Christians in Handel's day to have foretold the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in the year 70. This horrible event was construed as a divine punishment of Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God's promised messiah. The Hallelujah chorus apparently sees cause for rejoicing in such vengeance. Further, this chorus quotes the melodies of several hymns whose texts concern the depiction in Matthew 25 of acceptance by a bridegroom of five wise virgins and his rejection of five foolish virgins. This parable was taken to symbolize the welcoming of Ecclesia, Christianity and Jesus as the messiah, and the rejection of Synagoga and Judaism. In 18th-century England most Christians fervently believed that a choice between Judaism and Christianity was a choice between eternal damnation and eternal salvation. This would have represented motivation indeed for Messiah to project Christian theological contempt for its sibling religion.

Musical (Ad)venturers: Colonial Composers and Composition in Melbourne, 1870–1901

In November 1874, the Melbourne Philharmonic Society (MPS) premiered a new sacred cantata, Adoration, as part of their subscription concert series at Melbourne's Town Hall. The composer, Austin T. Turner, lived in Ballarat, Victoria, and had come to Melbourne to conduct the premiere of his work, using the Melbourne Philharmonic's available force of three hundred performers. Turner was well qualified for the task, being known within the musical community as an organist, singing instructor and conductor of Ballarat's Philharmonic and Harmonic societies since 1864. Programmed for the second half of the concert, and following on from Beethoven's First Symphony and Mass in C, Adoration was certainly an ambitious project, consisting of thirty numbers divided into two broad sections. The text was based on the Psalms with some original words by Turner himself and some borrowed from the Hallelujah chorus in Beethoven's Mount of Olives. The music was described, with some commendation, as having a ‘kind of power about it’, although not being particularly individual or showing ‘a new turn of thought, either in the invention of his melodies, or the construction of his harmonies’. Turner demonstrated an ‘affluent mind in music’, as evidenced by his ability to keep his parts moving; perhaps a little too much according to the Argus critic, who found one or two simpler numbers ‘a great relief in the midst of the kaleidoscope combinations of sound in which in this composition he has revelled’. References in the style of known composers gave the work merit, the music partly reminiscent of ‘Haydn, of Beethoven, of Handel, of Mendelssohn, Arne, Purcell, and others … and in so far as it does this it is a worthy composition’. The Melbourne Age reviewer also assured readers that the work contained many genuine moments that ‘even the greatest composer need not be ashamed’, again citing the works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn as principal models for inspiration.

Early American Anthems (review)

CRITICAL EDITIONS Early American Anthems. Edited by Karl Kroeger. (Recent Researches in American Music, 36-37.) Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2000. [Pt. 1: Anthems for Public Celebrations. Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xxv; 6 plates (3 p.); score, 185 p.; crit. report, p. 187-92; indexes of composers and opening lines, 1 p. ISBN 0-89579-459-4. $75. Pt. 2: Anthems for Special Occasions. Acknowledgments, p. vii; score, 166 p.; crit. report, p. 167-73; indexes of composers and opening lines, 1 p. ISBN 0-89579-460-8. $65.] Karl Kroeger, easily the most prolific editor of early American sacred music, offers in these newly published volumes of the series Recent Researches in American Music a selection of anthems for church services and special occasions. The two handsomely produced volumes published by A-R Editions contain fifty-two musical settings of mostly prose sacred texts first published between 1761 and 1810. The forty-five composers represented here range from nativeborn, part-time musicians with a modicum of training to immigrant musical professionals from England and elsewhere. They lived and worked in communities as diverse as New York City and Mt. Holly, Vermont; they wrote music variously for Congregationalist meetinghouses and for Catholic churches; and while some, such as Boston's William Billings (1746-1800), have made a name for themselves in histories of American music, others, such as W. Newcomb, are biographical nonentities. Kroeger's selection of music is as diverse as the composers these pieces represent. There are anthems for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Fast Day, meetinghouse dedications, ministers' ordinations, funerals, charity meetings, and a marriage. Lengths range from the 28 measures of Raynor Taylor's (ca. 1747-1825) lively Hallelujah Chorus to the 399 of Daniel Hardy's (1773-1833) Thanksgiving anthem O Come, Let Us Sing unto the Lord, this edition's real tour de force. Kroeger's many years of studying the sacred music of early America have paid off well here; few scholars could produce as rich a representation of this particular repertory. While some of the very finest early American anthems are missing-Justin Morgan's (1747-1798) Judgment anthem Hark, Ye Mortals, Hear the Trumpet or Billings's setting of As the Hart Panteth (Psalm 42) come immediately to mind-it is true that Kroeger has edited these elsewhere (Two Vermont Composers: The Collected Works of Elisha West and Justin Morgan, Music of the New American Nation, 7 [New York: Garland, 1997], 125-36; The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), The Complete Works of William Billings, 1 [Boston: The American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981], 138-51). What we do have here will certainly enrich the repertories of choruses and choirs for years to come. All this said, Kroeger would likely agree that these volumes do not present the real glories of early American sacred music. The modest musical training of most composers active in America between 1760 and 1810 allowed them to excel only at the miniature scale of the psalm or hymn tune that sets a four-line stanza of text and averages sixteen measures in length. Some of these tiny pieces-whether by the well-known Billings or by rural unknowns-are arguably as beautiful and powerful as any choral music of comparable length. The early American anthem, on the other hand, suffers from the often-fatal malady of tonal monotony. Its composers knew nothing of true modulation and usually could not sustain interest over the longer stretches of time that anthems need. In the present edition, David Men-ill's (fl. ca. 1799) Thanksgiving anthem Grateful Songs and Anthems Bring is an egregious example: its 109 measures seesaw between G and D, and the occasional threemeasure phrase (where four measures are expected) cannot adequately offset the tonal predictability. Many early American composers seem to have been aware of this shortcoming and attempted to compensate for it by creating interest through means other than tonal variety. …

Book of the Undead

Book of the Undead

The Many-Headed Hydra of Theory vs. the Unifying Mission of Teaching

English professors humanized world with thrice-weekly doses of literary instruction, exchanged witty conversation and recondite literary allusions at Friday afternoon sherry hour, and generally agreed with each other about which books to teach, how to teach them, and importance of teaching them. This golden age must have ended right before I entered field. My whole history within suggests that getting English professionals to agree in large numbers about almost anything is nearly as difficult as herding cats or training king cobras to hiss Hallelujah Chorus in four-part harmony. I do not intend to rehearse causes of our winter's discontent-Gerald Graff and others have amply analyzed our disciplinary doings and undoings-but it is useful to observe that even when we are merely describing the condition of our discipline (rather than analyzing it), our constant themes are loss and gain, change and resistance to change, and nature of professional and intellectual anxieties produced by all of above. John Bassett in a College English essay thoughtfully identifies what he takes to be major changes [that] have discipline, most significant of which is surely our redirection toward becoming another kind of altogether: the explosion of interest in theory.., .has been key to movement of literary study toward social sciences (321; emphasis added). Bassett shows steelier nerves than most of us in his willingness to understate our disciplinary disunity. He sees us as being merely redirected

Handel's hallelujah chorus

Handel's hallelujah chorus

Handel's hallelujah chorus

Handel's hallelujah chorus