Music Examples Research Articles

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie K. Zelensky

Reviewed by: Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie K. Zelensky David Salkowski Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination. By Natalie K. Zelensky. (Russian Music Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xiii, 235 p. ISBN 978025304118 (hardcover), $85; ISBN 9780253041197 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9780253041203 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 66] One of the vexing questions of Russian émigré music in the twentieth century is to what extent it constituted a community. Some of the most prominent Russian composers of the century (Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and, for a time, Sergey Prokofiev) and many of their lesser-known counterparts (for example, Vernon Duke [Vladimir Dukelsky], Arthur Lourié, and Aleksandr Tikhonovich Grechaninov) settled in the United States. Yet these composers hardly formed a coherent group in terms of compositional style, cultural sensibilities, or even social networks and professional institutions. What these composer-centric questions fail to account for, however, is the dynamic process of identity and community formation at work every day among the thousands of Russians who settled in the US after the Bolshevik Revolution as they sang, danced, published, and broadcast a musical “Russianness” for themselves and their US hosts. Natalie Zelensky takes up this very process in Performing Tsarist Russia in New York. She is well suited to the task: as an ethnomusicologist who draws on personal interviews as well as archival evidence and the rich material culture of sheet music publications and LP jackets, she is able to account for, at once, the intimate, the communal, and the commercial in ways that previous studies of elite émigré composers have not. While Grechaninov, Rachmaninoff, and, to a greater extent, Duke make appearances throughout the book, they are but representatives of the collective protagonist, the generation of White (i.e., anti-Bolshevik) Russians who fled the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–22), which Zelensky terms the “First Wave” of emigration. Throughout the five chapters, Zelensky charts this generation’s development at discrete moments up nearly to the present day. Importantly, as the subtitle of the book indicates, the fascination in the United States with the brand of Russianness presented by the émigré community forms a running secondary theme that helps explain its increasingly eclectic incarnations, such as the movie star Yul Brynner’s tall tales of his own origin (pp. 95–96) and popular songs like the “Fox-Trotsky” (pp. 79–86). Particularly illuminating are the first three chapters, where Zelensky sustains engagements with song and the ways in which it absorbed class, ethnic, generational, and ideological difference into an amalgamated Russian identity. In chapter 1, Zelensky analyzes the programs of the “Russian Evenings” that took place in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s alongside recordings of the performers they featured, such as Olena Voron ova. This analysis reveals some of the most intriguing ironies of the émigrés’ self-presentation. Though most of the First Wave émigrés were ethnic Russians from the upper classes, they represented themselves aurally through the music of the peasantry in folk song, and of one of Russia’s marginalized ethnic minorities in “gypsy” romance. The glorification of the “folk” is perhaps unsurprising, since the First Wave émigrés were not only presenting themselves as Russian to themselves and their host country but also asserting that they were preserving the real Russia that the Soviets had tried to destroy. Zelensky demonstrates the paradoxical and constructed nature of this “real Russia” through descriptions of Voron ova’s stylized “folk” vocal production alongside the lavish, archaic “boyar” costumes donned by performers of this music, a phenomenon she aptly terms “class-dressing” (p. 48). The centrality of “gypsy” song to ideas of Russianness in the US is more complicated. Zelensky effectively blends affective and historical explanations of how the White Russian émigrés, who once occupied a hegemonic position vis-à-vis the marginalized Roma people in Imperial Russia, came to appropriate “gypsy” song during their own [End Page 67] period of itinerancy. In a compelling summary of the genre’s cathartic appeal, Zelensky describes “the gypsy romance as simultaneous instigator and alleviator of toska,” that...

Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty

Reviewed by: Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty James Ruchala Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes. By Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty. Fenton, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2021. [212 p. ISBN 9781513466378 (paperback), $24.99; ISBN 9781513459936 (e-book), $19.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, map, tune indexes. This book is an attempt to provide “a well-rounded survey and exploration of the fiddle music of the Appalachian Region” of the United States (p. 5). The Appalachian region comprises all or part of thirteen states, though this book focuses on only six of those: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Vir -ginia. The three authors present a brief bullet-point overview of the history and characteristics of the Appalachian fiddle tradition—also called “old-time fiddling.” The tradition started with the immigration of settlers from Great Britain into the region and absorbed the [End Page 89] influence of Native Americans, German immigrants, African American musicians, and published popular and spiritual music. The radio and recording industries popularized some fiddlers early in the twentieth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, surviving culture-bearers became teachers to generations of revivalists both within and without the region. The broad outlines of this history will be well known to most practitioners of old-time fiddling, and this book does not seek to make a broader interpretation of that history. What it does do is delve into the technical and musical detail of what these fiddle players were doing, as far as can be determined from extant recorded performances. The bulk of the book is dedicated to chapters on six Appalachian states, with sections on six to nine representative fiddlers from each state. Old-time music has been recorded in several different contexts, and this book includes musicians from each of them. There are some of the legends of the early recording era, like John Carson, Lowe Stokes, and Charlie Bowman; some whose influence comes to us mainly through field recordings made by researchers or family members, including John M. Salyer, Henry Reed, Bill Stepp, and Luther Strong; and some of the revival-era mentors like Tommy Jarrell, Melvin Wine, and Clyde Daven-port. West Virginia’s Clark Kessinger was a recording artist in the 1920s who lived into the revivalist era. Some figures are lesser known but just as worthy of study, including Emma Lee Dickerson, Osey Helton, and Sarah Singleton. One of the lessons to be derived from this book is the strength of the tradition and the high level of artistry to be found in all these contexts. Roy Andrade offers a short overview of the history of fiddling in each state and a capsule biography of each of the musicians. The bulk of the book—and the collection’s real value—comprises Drew Beisswenger’s detailed transcriptions of the tunes as played by these historic musicians, along with analytical notes. Each transcription includes references to help find the specific recording from which it was made. Most of the performances are from old commercial recordings on 78-rpm records or from field recordings. Many have not been reissued commercially but can be found for streaming or purchase on the internet, and the authors helpfully provide resources for locating these recordings. Most transcriptions of recordings fall somewhere between strictly descriptive and prescr iptive, while the quality and detail of the transcriptions is better than I’ve seen in comparable works. Having done some transcriptions of fiddling, I know that it can be both frustrating and enlightening. Most often, one hears more in the music than can be put on paper. Beisswengers’s transcriptions include many more details of ornamentation than found in comparable books like Jeff Todd Titon’s Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001) and Miles Krassens’s Masters of Old-Time Fiddling (New York: Oak Publications, 1983), both of which the authors acknowledge as influential. In some cases, the gap between what can be heard and what is notated begins to show. Benton Flippen’s frequent use of slides is...

Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont by Don Fader

Reviewed by: Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont by Don Fader Michael Vincent Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the Prince de Vaudémont. By Don Fader. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2021. [xvii, 343 p. ISBN 9781783276288 (hard-cover), $115; ISBN 9781800102798 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, appendixes, index. Music in the eighteenth century is known for its international contexts. From Joseph Haydn’s proclamation that his language is understood all over the world to the ubiquity of Italian opera in capital cities, the pan-European culture called “cosmopolitanism” helped music flourish across national boundaries (p. 1). Don Fader explores an early case of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism in Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700. The book focuses on musical activities in the orbit of Charles-Henri de Lorraine, Prince de Vaudémont (1649–1723). The Lorrainese prince was culturally French but politically independent. He served as the governor of Milan from 1698 to 1706. Vaudémont was known for his military prowess and dancing skills. He impressed Louis XIV, who favored him personally even when they were at odds politically. The bulk of the book focuses on the cultural exchange that happened during Vaudémont’s Milanese period, when his court exchanged music and musicians between Paris, Germany, and other Italian courts. Much of the music examined comes from opera, but other genres considered include instrumental dance music, cantatas, and pedagogical treatises. Aligning with the book’s thesis that Vaudémont’s patronage resulted in a hybridization of French and Italian styles, the music that Fader examines demonstrates this cosmopolitan paradigm. The primary musical figure in the book is Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, who served as Vaudémont’s composer-in-residence and whom the prince sought out because of his cosmopolitan style and influence as a musician and publisher in France. This book is the first major published study on Montéclair, who composed instrumental and vocal music, wrote a violin method and other tutors, and was well known as a pedagogue. Along with Marc-Antoine Charpentier and André Campra, he was one of the first French composers to write an Italian aria. His early compositions appeared in well-known publications, which Fader analyzes and contextualizes. His music showed him as a composer at home in both French and Italian styles, which was ideal for Vaudémont’s taste and led to his employment with the prince. At its heart, the book is a documentary study of the musical activities that arose from Vaudémont’s patronage. Fader’s is the first major study of these documents, which include financial [End Page 61] records, correspondence, and other papers related to the prince’s holdings. Fader had his work cut out for him. Previously, there had been no major modern biography of the prince, perhaps owing to the difficulty of tracing scattered sources from an itinerant life. Furthermore, the Vaudémont papers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France consist of over one thousand sets of documents and have been combined with unrelated holdings from the nineteenth century. The book is therefore a major contribution to understanding the lives of two major historical figures, Vaudémont and Montéclair. Fader analyzes the vast collection of documents and insightfully reconstructs musical activ ities related to Vaudémont’s patronage. To cite one of many examples, he tracks the payment records of a Milanese violin band over the years 1698–1706 as they played for a number of occasions, including balls, royal birthdays, and other celebrations. The number of players varied as time went on, but Fader suggests that the frequent occurrences of twelve and twenty-four players meant that they modeled themselves on the French royal twenty-four violins. The first record of payment shows the band being paid “for the operas,” suggesting that the musicians were from the orchestra of the first major opera staged under Vaudémont’s patronage, La pros-perità di Elio Seiano, which ran from December 1698 to January 1699 (p. 65). Fader connects the band’s...

Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 by Thomas Irvine

Reviewed by: Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 by Thomas Irvine Manuel Erviti and Jeremy Leong Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839. By Thomas Irvine. (New Material Histories of Music.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. [vii, 271 p. ISBN 9780226667126 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780226667263 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, figures, endnotes, bibliography, index. In Listening to China, Thomas Irvine examines how the West experienced China aurally from the latter part of the Enlightenment to the beginning of the First Opium War (1839–42). Drawing on travelogues, personal diaries, letters, manuscript accounts, music historical documents, and other supporting evidence, he explains how China’s soundscape was articulated through the partial views of European travelers and how some prominent Western music historians/scholars (particularly Charles Burney, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Adolf Bernhard Marx), who had not experienced China nor its music, sought to speculate on the Middle Kingdom’s sounds and musical development. In their effort to construct their own “enlightened” understanding of global music history, China was categorically excluded, as it failed to measure up to the European standard of musical progress. Irvine argues that their omissions were largely an acknowledgement of their “insecurities” of the placement of European music on the world stage. After all, the development of Chinese music, with its emphasis on melody, took a defiant stand against the widely accepted European model that asserted the inevitable path of monody to polyphony as a definitive sign of progress. As Irvine reveals, Burney, Forkel, and Marx excluded China from their major music projects and instead relegated their writings on Chinese music history to “second-order texts” (p. 4). By at least giving some attention to Chinese music, the work of these three can attest to contribute to the musical concerns of Europe’s global engagements and to imagine “the globe as a ‘given’ category destined to be dominated by Europe” (p. 5). Sound studies and postcolonial theory form the disciplinary framework of Irvine’s arguments in his attempt to structure a global narrative of the West’s relationship with China. “My aim,” he writes, is not to write a comprehensive history of Sino-Western soundscapes that gives equal weight to Western and Chinese “sides.” Instead it is to show how Western travelers in China and writers with a stake in Chinese music or sound, or both, defined themselves as Europeans or North Americans in a global context. . . . These travelers sometimes reacted to China’s sounds in ways shaped by what they had read. Likewise, the reports they brought home . . . in turn shaped perspectives on the sounds and music of China written by those who had never traveled there. Taken as a whole, I tell the story of a feedback loop on a global scale. (pp. 15–16) [End Page 58] Irvine’s main objective is to fill a lacuna in research on Westerners’ sonic knowledge of China around 1800 and at the same time argue that the claims of “universal” value in Western music history were undeniably aided by comparing it with the “great ‘other’ (China)” (p. 2). Furthermore, the debate over the universal ear in Europe during the eighteenth century brought about a new understanding of human communication across the globe. Europeans did entertain the idea that different peoples could possibly hear differently. By 1830, however, with Europe’s rise of military power and economic ambitions overseas, the “universal ear was dead” (p. 2). Evidently, Western art music began to be seen as the “arbiter” for excellence and musical progress when compared to the development of non-Western music, including Chinese music. In chapter 1, Irvine relates how Europe’s commercial interests in China had also brought about an intense flow of writing about the Qing dynasty to Europe. While a lot of these writings focused on ways to convert China to Catholicism, they also discussed the sound of China and the role auditory sense could possibly play in shaping Chinese civilization. Interestingly, many eighteenth-century European writers viewed China as equal if not, in some areas, superior to the West. The opinions of some, however, began to turn negative towards China in the early nineteenth...

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Author Submission Guidelines

Author Submission Guidelines

ПОДБОРЪТ НА ТВОРБИ ОТ МУЗИКАЛНАТА ЛИТЕРАТУРА ПРИ ВЪЗПРИЕМАНЕ НА ИНСТРУМЕНТАЛНА МУЗИКА – СТЪПКА КЪМ ВЪЗПИТАНИЕТО НА БЪДЕЩИ СЛУШАТЕЛИ

The proposed material examines the musical activity. Perception in preschool and primary school age, through the great opportunities and diversity of instrumental music. The following is considered: the specifics of getting acquainted with a new musical work in preschool and primary school age; the preliminary preparation of the teacher; selection of musical examples with sound and sound imitation and program works. The repertoire proposals with works by Bulgarian composers prevail. Conclusions have been made. The study, analysis, discussion of various instrumental models is a step forward in preparing future students to educate and cultivate criteria, taste and aesthetics, to expand their common culture, to comprehend and understand the musical language.

Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, by Samantha Ege

<i>Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price</i>, by Samantha Ege

Breakdown of the Types of Participation in Different Techniques of Comprovization on the Basis of Some Concrete Musical Examples

Breakdown of the Types of Participation in Different Techniques of Comprovization on the Basis of Some Concrete Musical Examples

Music for Bass Trombone: A Reference Book of Works for Solo Bass Trombone with Orchestra, Band &amp; Chamber Ensemble by Clinton F. Nieweg, and: Modern Times for Brass: Experimentelle Spieltechniken auf Blechblasinstrumenten = Experimental Playing Techniques for Brass Instruments by Malte Burba and Paul Hübner

Reviewed by: Music for Bass Trombone: A Reference Book of Works for Solo Bass Trombone with Orchestra, Band & Chamber Ensemble by Clinton F. Nieweg, and: Modern Times for Brass: Experimentelle Spieltechniken auf Blechblasinstrumenten = Experimental Playing Techniques for Brass Instruments by Malte Burba and Paul Hübner Peter G. Fielding Music for Bass Trombone: A Reference Book of Works for Solo Bass Trombone with Orchestra, Band & Chamber Ensemble. 3rd ed. By Clinton F. Nieweg. Vancouver, BC: Cherry Classics Music, 2018. [292 p. ISBN 9790530057865 (paperback and e-book), $52.50.] Bibliography, list of publishers and sources, select indexes by accompanying ensemble. Modern Times for Brass: Experimentelle Spieltechniken auf Blechblasinstrumenten = Experimental Playing Techniques for Brass Instruments. By Malte Burba and Paul Hübner. Translation by Daniel Costello. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2019. [154 p. ISBN 9783765104459 (paperback), $72.] German and English. Illustrations, diagrams, indexes of music examples. Clinton Nieweg's Music for Bass Trombone provides a revised and enlarged update to the recent second edition of 2017 and serves as a significant expansion of the original sixty-three pages of Music for Bass Trombone with Orchestra: A Handbook (Denton, TX: Kagarice Brass Editions, 2010). This work is constructed as two autonomous compendiums of repertory information for solo bass trombone and accompanying ensemble. Part 1 surveys solo bass trombone repertory with orchestra (or string ensemble), and part 2 provides a similar listing of solos with varied band ensembles (concert band, wind ensemble, brass band, jazz ensemble, big band). Each part is augmented with lists of compositions for three or more trombones. Each part contains introductory materials, including a preface, accompanying instruments, pricing, grade level, and acknowledgements. The work contains over seven hundred entries for compositions, including information concerning composer/ arranger, instrumentation, duration, movements, first performance, range, grade level, sources, publisher, copyright date, available recordings, You-Tube links, and information about alternate editions and alternate accompanying ensembles. The extensive internal cross-referencing of solos with both orchestral and band accompaniment is valuable. The entries make frequent reference to Vern Kagarice's Annotated Guide to Trombone Solos with Band and Orchestra (Lebanon, IN: Studio Publications Recordings, 1974), Thomas G. Everett's Annotated Guide to Bass Trombone Literature (Nashville, TN: Brass Press, 1985), and Erik Thomas Shinn's "Annotated Bibliography of Works for Solo Bass Trombone and Wind Band," D.M. treatise, Florida State University, 2015 (http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-9453, accessed 3 January 2022), a resource to which Shinn provides updates through a website listing wind band solo repertory at http://www.erikshinn.com/bassboneband (accessed 3 January 2022). Music for Bass Trombone is a valuable resource for institutions possessing a sizable bass trombone studio and needing to support bass trombone performance, literature, and research projects, as well as orchestral and band ensembles and organizations that regularly schedule solo bass trombone works in their artistic seasons. Given the number of hyperlinks and URLs Nieweg provides, I recommend the e-book format for ease of access to these web-based resources. Malte Burba and Paul Hübner's Modern Times for Brass is a bilingual English-and German-language treatise with companion compact disc that surveys extended brass performance techniques and their notation to help convey the nuances of pitch and timbre that these approaches can produce. The foreword, by Romanian-born German composer and music educator Adriana Hölszky, affirms relevance of the volume to contemporary solo brass repertory, reflecting explorations at Darmstadt and the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/ Music to transcend conventional notation and sound possibilities. Over seventy music compositions spanning [End Page 569] fifty-one composers are referenced, with a large number of twenty-first-century examples. While somewhat trumpetcentric, reflecting the authors' expertise, this work provides a comprehensive chronicle of extended performance techniques spanning a range of traditional brass instruments, as well as historical (ophicleide, Wagner tuba) and less common brass-affiliated aerophones (alphorn, didgeridoo, hose tubing). The book is divided into chapters, with a detailed table of contents and subheadings in lieu of an index. Fundamental aspects of sound production are paired with acoustical explanations to present and explain a range of extended and nonstandard alternative sound production techniques. To provide an example of breadth...

Syncopation and Groove in Polyphonic Music

Music often evokes a regular beat and a pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to that beat called groove. Recent studies show that a rhythmic pattern’s ability to evoke groove increases at moderate levels of syncopation, essentially, when some notes occur earlier than expected. We present two studies that investigate that effect of syncopation in more realistic polyphonic music examples. First, listeners rated their urge to move to music excerpts transcribed from funk and rock songs, and to algorithmically transformed versions of these excerpts: 1) with the original syncopation removed, and 2) with various levels of pseudorandom syncopation introduced. While the original excerpts were rated higher than the de-syncopated, the algorithmic syncopation was not as successful in evoking groove. Consequently, a moderate level of syncopation increases groove, but only for certain syncopation patterns. The second study provides detailed comparisons of the original and transformed rhythmic structures that revealed key differences between them in: 1) the distribution of syncopation across instruments and metrical positions, 2) the counter-meter figures formed by the syncopating notes, and 3) the number of pickup notes. On this basis, we form four concrete hypotheses about the function of syncopation in groove, to be tested in future experiments.

Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt

Reviewed by: Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy by Erinn E. Knyt Jonathan Kregor Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy. By Erinn E. Knyt. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. [xii, 372 p. ISBN 9780253026286 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780253026842 (paperback), $38; ISBN 9780253026897 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, tables. Ferruccio Busoni's activities as critic, pianist, and composer are usually characterized as products of their time, bringing about no lasting impact. Yet as Erinn Knyt argues throughout Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy, his presence was [End Page 549] profoundly felt in the twentieth century and continues well into the twenty-first. Specifically, she identifies various manifestations of Busoni's "aesthetic ideals" (p. 5) in the activities and output of selected students that Busoni mentored or inspired, including Jean Sibelius, Edgard Varèse, Louis Gruenberg, Otto Luening, and Philipp Jarnach. Many of these students became musical pioneers in their own right, whether in exploring "how technology and new instruments could expand musical possibilities, how sonority could become an integral material of music," or "how stylistic heterogeneity could be used to break away from traditional forms" (p. 8). Chapter 1, "Unconventional Maestro," focuses on Busoni's general pedagogical approach, which on the surface does not seem to have been unique. It was, however, strikingly conservative. Johann Sebastian Bach provided his students with countless solutions to age-old questions of form, counterpoint, and thematic cohesion, with book 2 of Das wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier) serving as the closest thing to a one-stop composition manual that Busoni would ever allow. Instead of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, or Gustav Mahler, it was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who guided Busoni's advice on orchestration. Busoni's abandoned orchestration treatise from around 1905 emphasizes Mozartian principles of spacing, voice leading, and "diverse instrumental timbres and colors" (p. 16) as do the exercises in orchestral transcription using Mozart's concertos that Busoni regularly assigned to his pupils. Indeed, Austro-Italian models dominated Busoni's examples of dramatic forms, musical characterization, stylistic cohesion, and even subject matter, with Mozart also serving as the source of an operatic tradition that ran through Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Giuseppe Verdi. On the other hand, a strongly Germanic line of philosophers from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Nietzsche shaped Busoni's aesthetics, which in turn attracted him to various contemporary movements, such as Jugendstil and futurism, while developing his own ideas that jelled in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst ([Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music] Leipzig: Insel, 1907). Knyt is keen to point out that, despite its title, the Entwurf is not about breaking with the past. Rather, it reflects Busoni's pedagogy of "embrac[ing] the stylistic characteristics of all the compositions [a student admires] and to combine them, reflecting the multiplicity of musics in the sounding universe" (p. 24). Syncretism, however, does not a system make, and Knyt rightly notes the unpredictability and even contradictions of Busoni's pedagogical statements. Improvisation was a recommended compositional stimulus, but so was having a clear vision for the work. Students were inspired to seek out the unknown, yet Busoni cautioned against prioritizing originality. Serendipitous human experience could form the characteristic marrow of a work, just as much as the calculated lines and angles of centuries old architectural masterpieces. Knyt's comparisons of the teaching styles of Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger at the close of chapter 1 hammer home just how distinctive Busoni's was for its day. In the next four chapters, Knyt examines how selected students put Busoni's esoteric prescriptions into practice. Sibelius, although never an official student, benefited enormously from Busoni's counsel for almost thirty-five years. According to Knyt, the breadth of their relationship has made it difficult for scholars to treat it comprehensively. She seeks to remedy that situation in chapter 2, "Janus-Faced Modernism," by arguing Busoni [End Page 550] "stimulated Sibelius's imagination and was a catalyst for his experimentation with sound, color, and structure. He helped Sibelius discover a distinctive style that was an alternative to both the avant-garde and the conservative trends of the day. At the same time, he promoted his music across Europe...

In Search of Carl Czerny’s Schemata: Listening to Early Nineteenth-Century Improvisation

AbstractThis article analyzes Carl Czerny’s exemplars for fantasizing in Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829). I argue that a musical prototype combining scale-degree schemata (Meyer 1980, Gjerdingen 2007) and sentential features (Caplin 1998) emerges as an implicit knowledge structure in several of Czerny’s notated musical examples that demonstrate how to react to a given theme for improvisation. Through an examination of notated fantasies recommended by Czerny as models for extemporizing, I propose a beginning-of-fantasy prototype, which allows us to discern improvisatory qualities in Beethoven’s notated “artworks” such as the Tempest sonata, the Appassionata, and others.

Idiosyncratic Audio Feedback Networks for Music Creation

This article presents practical and artistic contributions to the field of computer music systems based on audio feedback networks. The ideas that oriented the conception of two digital music instruments and examples of their use in the author's music practice are discussed. The article begins with a general conceptualization of feedback systems as well as a brief historical review of its use in experimental music. Later, a more specific contextualization of its application in recent computer music research and artwork is made, and two contributions are presented: the first is a network of cross-modulated sinusoidal oscillators (by frequency modulation), and the second is a network of algorithms for playing and transforming pre-recorded sound samples. In conclusion, examples of the artistic usage of the described systems to the creation of electroacoustic music are discussed.

Body, Music and Electronics: Pierre Schaeffer and the Phenomenology of Music

"The article presents a phenomenological investigation of body and music, with particular emphasis on electronic music. The investigation builds on theoretical framework developed in phenomenological investigations in art by Edmund Husserl, Mikel Dufrenne and Roman Ingarden. It is guided beyond these analyses by investigations of particular musical examples in avant-garde acoustic and electronic music. In the former case it tackles music from which body is being consciously erased. In the latter case, the erasure occurs instantly. This negative approach elucidates the function of body in music. In case of electronic music, the article focuses on writings and music of pioneer of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer. Central argument is that electronic music always has been and still is defined by absence of body, here phenomenologically considered as Leib. As a consequence of the phenomenological elucidation, it is ultimately shown that erasure of body has been one of the avant-garde music’s crucial techniques, and that this avant-garde residue remains in electronic music as such, both experimental and mainstream. Keywords: Schaeffer, Husserl, phenomenology, music, body, aesthetics "

Deciphering the Spell‐Book of the Score: Musical Intelligibility and Notational Citation in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Music Writing

A problem for those writing about music around 1800 was delivering persuasive judgments about works that readers had not heard, especially for journals that sought to mold a self‐conscious musical public. One tactic was the citation of musical examples in the form of interpolated images from the score. After surveying the development of this technique in the eighteenth century, this article examines the shifting use of musical citation in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. His review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for Leipzig's Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung pioneered a new use of citation that went beyond evaluation to deliver an aesthetic impression of the work. In his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, however, Hoffmann disavows musical examples, rewriting his Beethoven review without examples and creating a parodic notation to suggest the inability of citation to communicate musical effect.

Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect ed. by Biljana Milanović; Melita Milin and Fanka Lajić Mihajlović

Reviewed by: Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect ed. by Biljana Milanović; Melita Milin and Fanka Lajić Mihajlović Richard Louis Gillies Milanović, Biljana; Milin, Melita and Mihajlović, Fanka Lajić (eds). Music in Postsocialism: Three Decades in Retrospect. Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, 2020. xiii + 349 pp. Map. Illustrations. Music examples. Figures. Tables. Notes. References. Index. Available open access at <https://dais.sanu.ac.rs/handle/123456789/10158>. When it comes to scrutinizing and interpreting the myriad political, social and cultural shifts that attended the disintegration of the so-called ‘Eastern bloc’ and Yugoslavia during the late 1980s and 1990s, it would seem a truism [End Page 368] to point out that embracing a broad range of perspectives from representatives of the countries under consideration is essential to producing a nuanced understanding of the ‘postsocialist’ era. This recent publication from the Institute of Musicology at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) does precisely that, featuring a collection of fifteen essays by authors from Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. The representation of such a range of voices is valuable in a number of ways, not least because it shifts the focus from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (which typically feature as the primary signifiers of the collapse of socialism in much English-language scholarship) to other key social-political moments in central and (south-)east Europe such as the ‘Mineriads’ (Mineriadă) in Romania during the 1990s, the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992, the ensuing war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (which, as Fatima Hadžić observes, destroyed the musical as well as social infrastructure of the country, p. 174), the Siege of Sarajevo, the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, the redistribution of power in Serbia during the early 2000s, and other such events that musicologists in Western Europe and the United States have been somewhat slower to approach (and perhaps unwilling to confront). In doing so, the volume begins to highlight the heterogeneity of ways in which the transition to ‘postsocialism’ was experienced across Central and Eastern Europe. The volume is divided into three main sections that focus respectively on continuities between past and present, the role of festivals and institutions, and developments in traditional and popular musics. Particularly deserving of mention in this last category is Anna G. Piotrowska’s chapter on the phenomenon of Slavic metal in Poland, which closes the volume with a fascinating exploration of the intersections between Slavic mythology, religion, ritual and far-right politics in the emergent metal scene in Poland during the 1990s and 2000s, making a valuable contribution to the increasingly vibrant field of metal studies in music academia. In addition to chapters such as Piotrowska’s that focus on specific genres or aesthetics, others such as those by Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Rusudan Tsurtsumia take a broader historical approach that helps to decentralize our understanding of cultural institutions and art-music traditions in (south-)east Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in countries that have been somewhat underrepresented in English-language historical musicology (in this case, Romania and Georgia respectively). One of the strongest parts of the volume is the central chapter by Jelena Janković-Beguš and Ivana Medić, which explores the ruptures and continuities in Serbian musical culture following the breakup of the SFRY through the lens of the International Review of Composers (Međunarodna tribina kompozitora) — ‘the [End Page 369] most enduring annual festival of contemporary art music in Serbia, founded in 1992’ (p. 139). The Review is described as a ‘hybrid’ of previous Yugoslav festivals, yet one that was conceived as being of importance to the (re) affirmation of Serbian national identity, whilst simultaneously being ‘a “place for escapism”, an “oasis” of beauty and “sanity” amidst the turmoil of the 1990s’ (p. 146). This suggests both a continuity with, and desire to move away from the collective Yugoslav identity of the preceding decades. Particularly resonant in this regard is an extract from Zorica Premate’s review of the festival from 1991 which characterizes postmodernism...

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Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera, by Gabriela Cruz

<i>Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera</i>, by Gabriela Cruz

Methods and techniques of jazz­pop music arrangement for button accordion and piano accordion in swing style

The relevance. The article covers the topics of popularization of instrumental performance of button and piano accordionists in terms of genre improvement of the concert repertoire, based on the idea of expanding the stylistic boundaries of the programme, offering new methods and techniques of instrumental arrangement when training and performing pop and jazz music in the preferred genres and styles, adapting the musical content to one’s performance.&#x0D; The aim of the article. The study explores the relevance of button and piano accordionists’ concert programme originality, as well as the need to add light genre pieces. The article also substantiates the question of the expediency of arranging the music of those genres which can sound more natural and be conveniently performed on instruments.&#x0D; The novelty. The study gives recommendations on structuring a composition in the standard form to facilitate the perception and understanding of complex rhythmic schemes of accompaniment for playing the part with the left hand and partially with the right one.&#x0D; The methodology. Methodology on the performing repertoire in the final stage, that is, on demonstrating the results of developing the programme at professional and other stages. &#x0D; For a detailed and practical approach to the work process, the swing style is proposed using the example of a vocal genre composition ‘Ain’t That a Kick In Head?’ by composer Jimmy Van Heusen to the lyrics of American author Sammy Cahn. There are also musical examples of working material for clarity of the practical process and consideration of key aspects of the issue of adaptation and arrangement of pieces in the content.&#x0D; The conclusions. The relevance of the problem of piano accordion and button accordion popularity among modern youth and beyond lies in many reasons. One of them, perhaps, is the general tendency of studying at music institutions to prepare performances rather for competitive events characterised by competitive spirit than for concerts, where the performance is aimed at the audience’s interest. The demonstration of video and audio materials and live performances of masters of this art in prestigious radio and television programmes is not widespread enough.