Musical Portrait Research Articles

Joyce's Mob: a Musical Portrait of a Family

This study presents the case of Joyce Evans, a well-known Australian photographer, and the musical work that she commissioned from the esteemed Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. The work, called Joyce's Mob, was premiered at the Sydney Opera House in August 2013. In her introductory speech on that occasion, eighty-four-year-old Evans called the work her ‘requiem’. The current paper explores Evans' motivation in commissioning the work and what processes the composer went through in attempting to write a ‘requiem’ for a living person. The paper traces the process of adjustment by Evans as she contemplates her advancing age and the changes this has and will involve. It also explores the compositional process undertaken by the composer.

FRANÇOIS COUPERIN,MORALISTE?

ABSTRACTAt the turn of the eighteenth century Jean de La Bruyère and many contemporary authors in diverse literary genres undertook intense studies of character that moved beyond popular portraiture to level moral critiques of the social dissimulation rampant in the era. The literary works from François Couperin's personal library and his musical character studies suggest that he too was intrigued with moral issues surrounding character. While musicologists have suggested connections between the character pieces of Couperin and the character studies of La Bruyère, existing comparisons between the two do not explore the moral dimensions of both literary and musical character studies. In this article, I argue that selected musical works from Couperin's four books ofpièces de clavecinparticipated vitally in the moral discourse of the era, taking up similar subject matter to widely read moralistes such as La Bruyère but employing music to articulate social criticism. By making use of the media of music and performance, Couperin's musical portraits extend the scope and power of literary moralism, enlisting musical performance to critique the social performance of false identities.

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siècle by Joseph Horowitz (review)

Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America's Fin de Siecle. By Joseph Horowitz. Berkeley: University of Cali - fornia Press, 2012. [xv, 263 p. ISBN 9780520267442. $39.95.] Illustrations, index.Moral Fire is book with mission. Like four individuals who comprise its portraits, Joseph Horowitz makes powerful case for music as valuable intellectual and cultural pursuit. His goal is to change our perspective on period that Mark Twain satirically labeled Gilded Age. For Horowitz, decades between Civil War and 1900 are characterized neither by self-absorbed wealthy nor proponents of genteel tradition (p. 6). On contrary, era burned with passion of civic idealism and melioristic vision. Individuals such as Henry Lee Higginson, founder of Boston Symphony Orches - tra (BSO); Laura Langford, creator of Brooklyn's Seidl Society; critic Henry Krehbiel; and composer Charles Ives epitomize this zeal. Their activities show the moral passion animating classical music at turn of twentieth century (p. 8).The origins of this project can be found in Horowitz's earlier studies, Wagner Nights (1994) and Classical Music in America: A History (2005), in which Higginson, Lang - ford, Krehbiel, and Ives made cameo appearances. As Moral Fire elaborates, their activities overlap in numerous ways, but especially through Anton Seidl and Antonin Dvorak, whose American visit spurred vigorous debate about formation of national school of composition. Another recurring theme is 1893 Columbian Exposition, which was visited by Dvorak, Krehbiel and Ives. Boston's musical horizon is repeatedly compared to New York's and found wanting by numerous figures, from critic J. S. Dwight, who poisonously personifies snobbish discomfort (p. 233) to inbred composers' community (p. 295) around John Knowles Paine.As an alternative to term Gilded Age, Horowitz calls years circa 1900 United States' de siecle. The latter term typically describes a dynamic moment in European culture . . . freighted with decadence that lasted from about 1880 to 1914 (p. 11). Just as Wagner Nights described specifically American response to Wagner's operas, Moral Fire posits distinctively American response to modernity at century's turn. What was shared across Atlantic was pursuit of intense experience. The difference is that Americans cloaked this desire in garb of moral improvement. Higginson, Kreh - biel, Langford, and Ives were all agents of upliftfor whom great art seemed . . . inherently ennobling (p. 226). It would be mistake, however, to characterize their actions as embrace of tradition. On contrary, their activities are signposts of an intense high culture in vigorous transition (p. 12). They were all fulcrum figures living in a moment in flux, American fin de siecle (p. 227).Horowitz's portrait of Higginson is an inspiring sketch of man who balanced profound musical interests with lucrative career in finance. The young Higginson dropped out of Harvard but spent several years studying music in Vienna. He returned to Boston just as Civil War began, and he served Union cause heroically. Having decided against musical career, he joined his family's modest firm and helped it become one of Boston's most prominent investment banks.In 1881, Higginson announced his intention to establish symphony orchestra offering twenty concerts each season. Its players would earn full-time salaries, relieving them of need to work for theaters and dances. Ticket prices were kept low, reviving Germania Musical Society's policies of 1850s. Anticipating that new organization was unlikely to survive through ticket sales, Higginson personally guaranteed payroll. He chose George Henschel and then Wilhelm Gericke as conductors and advised them closely on repertory. Although Higginson was sometimes seen as exercising an artistic dictatorship (p. …

Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present by Jean A. Boyd (review)

Reviewed by: Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present by Jean A. Boyd Travis D. Stimeling Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present. By Jean A. Boyd. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. Pp. 378. Illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780896727090, $65.00 cloth; ISBN 9780896727373, $39.95 paper.) Musicologist Jean A. Boyd has, for the past two decades or more, conducted interviews with dozens of western swing musicians and published three monographs documenting the history of the genre and exploring western swing's jazz roots: The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (University of Texas Press, 1998), We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills (University of Texas Press, 2003), and, most recently, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present (Texas Tech University Press, 2012). In Dance All Night, Boyd offers an encyclopedic study of forty-one western swing bands spanning the genre's eight-decade history in Texas and Oklahoma. In so doing, she challenges the historical dominance of the Milton Brown and Bob Wills bands by drawing much-needed attention to the lesser-known regional bands that dominated local radio, dance halls, and festival stages. Boyd divides the genre's history in the region into two epochs: a pre-1945 golden age in which local and regional bands thrived and a post-World War II era in which the dance hall and festival scenes were dominated by revivalists who preserved the music of the earlier generation and crossover acts who brought jazz, mainstream country, and rock and roll into the genre. In her discussion of the golden age, Boyd organizes the study geographically, providing short entries on bands in North, Central, South, and West Texas and in Oklahoma, while the postwar era is divided into two chapters exploring crossover and revivalist groups, respectively. Within each chapter, Boyd presents brief biographical and musical portraits of key bands and bandleaders, each drawing upon her extensive oral history research, musical analysis, and transcriptions of reissued and commercially available recordings. Readers will, no doubt, find Dance All Night to be a valuable resource when seeking information on important Texas and Oklahoma western swing bands. The structure of the book, however, offers little room for broader historical or musical contextualization. Brief introductions and conclusions in each chapter and a broad introduction to the book as a whole provide a backdrop for individual case studies, but a more thorough integration of these case studies may have made it easier for readers to draw connections between bands and between western swing [End Page 406] and the broader popular music landscape. Moreover, one of the greatest strengths of Boyd's study, the musical transcriptions, is underutilized, in large part because they are located in a somewhat awkwardly placed third section. Although the transcriptions offered here can provide valuable information pertaining to the improvisational approaches of many of the musicians under examination, Boyd offers little detail in her musical analysis, leaving the traces of musical innovation and influence largely unexamined. Despite these shortcomings, Boyd has made an important contribution to the western swing literature that will certainly prove useful to scholars, fans, and practicing musicians alike. Written in an accessible tone, the text is approachable, and Boyd's use of extended quotations from oral histories skillfully cedes authority to western swing practitioners. Moreover, musicians will appreciate Boyd's transcriptions, which stand as a valuable ancillary to the original source recordings, despite occasional typesetting errors that make them difficult to read. An ambitious project, Boyd's Dance All Night is essential reading for anyone interested in western swing, musical hybridity, and Texas dance hall culture. Travis D. Stimeling Millikin University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Ernesto Nazareth e a valsa da Suíte Retratos de Radamés Gnattali

Composta por Radamés Gnattali (1906-1988) em 1956 para bandolim solista, conjunto de choro e orquestra de cordas, Retratos é uma suíte em quatro movimentos onde são homenageadas algumas das mais expressivas personalidades do cenário da música popular brasileira: Pixinguinha, Ernesto Nazareth, Anacleto de Medeiros e Chiquinha Gonzaga. O que dá forma e sustenta a narrativa da obra é a ideia de que os movimentos constituem retratos musicais destes compositores. Assim, a estrutura de cada movimento foi elaborada a partir de um modelo, ou seja, de cada compositor Gnattali escolheu uma peça que serviria de roteiro para o processo criativo dos retratos. Este estudo tem como foco o segundo movimento da suíte, a valsa, observando como está relacionado ao seu respectivo modelo, a valsa Expansiva de Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934). Para ilustrar o paralelo será apresentada uma análise mais comparativa do que formal, procurando ampliar a visão do contexto histórico com evidências musicais, concentrando-se principalmente nos elementos comuns a ambas as peças.

Portraits in Beams and Barlines: Critical Music Editing and the Art of Notation

Composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) is known for extending the genre of musical portraits by having his subjects pose nearby as he sketched in sound. He composed around 150 such musical likenesses, exploring not only characterization but a personal discipline of spontaneity.' What Thomson drew in sound, style, melody, and harmony was an impression-of the individual sitting before him, of his own relationship to this person, and of his subject's connections to the world at large. Thomson's repertory of symbol and inference opened a broad range of representational possibilities, yet for all their expressive range, his portraits were inevitably drafted with pencil on staff paper.2 Thomson communicated his musical characterizations in concrete and traditional

A Garland of Songs for a Nation of Singers: An Episode in the History of Russia, the Herderian Tradition and the Rise of Baltic Nationalism

Analysis of the contents of Jānis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

DIVAS OF MOZART'S DAY: OPERATIC ARIAS BY DOMENICO CIMAROSA (1749–1801), VICENTE MARTÍN Y SOLER (1754–1806), WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791), VINCENZO RIGHINI (1756–1812), ANTONIO SALIERI (1750–1825), STEPHEN STORACE (1762–1796) Patrice Michaels (soprano), Peter van de Graaff (bass-baritone) / Classical Arts Orchestra / Stephen Alltop (conductor and fortepiano) Cedrille CDR 90000 064, 2002; one disc, 1'16"

DIVAS OF MOZART'S DAY: OPERATIC ARIAS BY DOMENICO CIMAROSA (1749–1801), VICENTE MARTÍN Y SOLER (1754–1806), WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791), VINCENZO RIGHINI (1756–1812), ANTONIO SALIERI (1750–1825), STEPHEN STORACE (1762–1796) Patrice Michaels (soprano), Peter van de Graaff (bass-baritone) / Classical Arts Orchestra / Stephen Alltop (conductor and fortepiano) Cedrille CDR 90000 064, 2002; one disc, 1'16" - Volume 1 Issue 1

Structuralism and Musical Plot

Structuralism and Musical Plot

In search of a musical subject in serial music: analytical examples from the oeuvre of the Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara

The problem of subject is studied within the frame of A.J. Gremas's theory of uttered enunciation (énonciation énoncée). An author can create in the work of art simulated imitations of the enunciation, including also its subject or persona. Likewise, Umberto Eco claims, an author can be manifested in the utterance as a textual strategy, more precisely as a recognizable style or idiolect. Textual strategies for creating the author's musical simulacra or portraits are demonstrated in Einojuhani Rautavaara's twelve-tone pieces, written during 1957–1965. The most significant common factor within the corpus is a morphologically constant melodic figure. Its occurrences can be interpreted as signs of the author, signs of his aesthetic presence in his works. But at the same time the little gestalt acts as the main catalyst for motivic processes, as the internal hero or the subject of the composition.

The Musical Portraits by Virgil Thomson

FROM 1928 to the present, Virgil Thomson has engaged in the unusual practice of composing abstract musical portraits of people. Although other composers have experimented with the idea of musical portraiture (Couperin, Schumann, and Elgar, for example), Thomson's portraits are distinguished by the unique compositional method with which they are produced, by their vitality and variety, and by their volume. As of this writing, Virgil Thomson has composed about 130 musical portraits for solo piano (about 100) and various instrumental groups. The focus of this essay is the unusual procedure that Thomson has developed for musical portrait composition as he has described it to me in conversation. But, the discussion is preceded by a description of the abstract word portraits of Thomson's friend and colleague Gertrude Stein (1872-1946), whose involvement with this genre gave Thomson the impetus to experiment with and devise his own procedures for musical portraiture.

Eighteenth-Century Conducting Practices

. N THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, as in earlier times, conducting was performed with a baton, a roll of sheet music or other paper, or just the hand. A baton was especially popular in France in opera conducting, while concert and choir performances were often conducted with a roll. German musicians knew the baton but preferred the roll; in contemporary reports the roll was often mentioned, and also has been found on paintings of musical scenes and portraits. In some places the roll was considered the symbol of the Kapellmeister, and its popularity continued into thE nineteenth century.l

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Journal Article REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access SCHUBERT, A MUSICAL PORTRAIT. By Alfred Einstein. ( Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. Pp. 343.) P. H. L. P. H. L. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3, July 1951, Pages 442–445, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/XXXVII.3.442 Published: 01 July 1951

A Musical Portrait

A Musical Portrait