Musical Prodigies Research Articles

A Study on the Application of Constructivist Theory in School Piano Teaching and Performance

This study investigates the application of constructivist theory in piano teaching at two music schools in China. The results reveal widespread utilization of constructivist teaching methods, such as activating prior knowledge, creating cognitive dissonance, and providing feedback. Piano teachers encountered challenges related to prior knowledge, dependency on rote learning, and inconsistent student engagement. Recommendations include encouraging students' independent exploration, promoting collaborative learning, employing multimodal strategies, and offering positive feedback. The application of constructivist theory in music education is expected to significantly transform the approach to nurturing the next generation of musical prodigies.

Robert Heller’s Magical Mystery Tours

Robert Heller, a virtually unknown figure in music-historical accounts, trained in the 1840s at the Royal Academy of Music in London and gave the American premieres of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos with the Germania Musical Society. But he also pursued a parallel career in theatrical magic, using his musical virtuosity to elevate his social and artistic stature as a conjurer. Between 1852 and 1878, his magic act was seen by millions in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, including states and territories in the American West never visited by contemporary piano virtuosos like Thalberg and De Meyer. While magicians routinely incorporated music in their acts, Heller’s virtuosity set him apart from his conjuring peers, including those who were themselves musicians. Using his musical expertise, he blended the magic show with other popular forms of spectacle, including minstrelsy, burlesque, and the piano recital, framing the latter as an extraordinary attraction. Advertisements and accounts of his performances reveal the marketing strategies Heller employed to negotiate the crowded landscape of consumer culture and American popular entertainment, especially during the tumultuous years of the Civil War. These strategies included co-branding, altering the titles and descriptions of musical compositions (particularly “Dixie”), and joining forces with “Blind Tom” (Thomas Greene) Wiggins, the Black, enslaved musical prodigy whom Heller had briefly tutored; they performed together in Louisville during one of the magician’s last appearances in the South. Throughout the 1860s, Heller was influenced by gendered musical practices and regional attitudes toward race and politics, leading him to market his act specifically toward middle-class women, music lovers, Unionists, and those seeking postwar reconciliation.

Hybrid ‘Authenticities’ in youth popular culture: performing costume and identity in the work of South Africa’s Sho Madjozi

The professional stage act of one of South Africa’s newest musical prodigies, Sho Madjozi, may be analysed as a quintessential Afropolitan example of the innovative and hybrid combination of music, costume, and dance in urban youth popular culture in Africa. This paper analyses the dynamic intersection between costume, music, and dance, presenting it as a crucial site where urban youth popular culture can reimagine tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating that contemporary African cultural identities exist in a constant state of flux. The paper borrows from scholarly insights on hybridity, identity, the Afropolitan and popular culture, as well as other writings in youth agency and popular culture, to argue that South Africa’s Sho Madjozi belongs with a tradition of contemporary urban youth performance culture that continuously resurrects and destabilizes elements of the past as it reimagines the future. Sho Madjozi’s unique style as a rap artist in Tsonga is presented as an illustration of the progressive role that contemporary urban youths in Africa can play as proponents of cultural preservation, even as they stand at the cross-roads between the old and the new.

The Piano Tuner by Chiang-Sheng Kuo

Reviewed by: The Piano Tuner by Chiang-Sheng Kuo Lauren Bo CHIANG-SHENG KUO The Piano Tuner Trans. Howard Goldblatt & Sylvia Li-chun Lin. New York. Arcade. 2023. 168 pages. "IN THE BEGINNING, we were souls without bodies." So begins the origin myth that launches Chiang-Sheng Kuo's multi-award-winning, best-selling novel The Piano Tuner, newly translated into English by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Per this creation myth, God wished to give the souls a mortal form. God was only able to trick our souls into entering bodies by having angels play music so enchanting that we wished to have ears so that we could hear it. The unnamed narrator—and titular piano tuner—uses this creation myth as a recurring motif throughout the novel. This myth serves as both a suggestion of a universal connection between music and our truest selves as well as an exploration of the human pursuit of the divine and the absolute. This poetic opening swiftly leads to the introduction of Lin, a handsome, older, self-assured, and self-made businessman, who contrasts the nameless middle-aged narrator's balding appearance and lack of socially respected ambitions. The narrator reveals early on that he was a musical prodigy who long ago forfeited any ambitions of being a concert pianist; after briefly dabbling with teaching, he realized he preferred the solitary nature of tuning, a decision that is misunderstood by others, who assume that he simply had no potential as a performer or teacher. Though the book is written from the humorously self-deprecating narrator's perspective ("I have enough self-awareness to know that I'm not the protagonist"), this narrator curiously has access to Lin's private thoughts and opinions, such as Lin's belief that the piano was an inherently masculine instrument, despite both his wife's love for the instrument and the cultural expectation, as described by the narrator's observations of Lin's social circles, that all marriageable young women learn to play the piano passably. The book begins in the aftermath of Lin losing his much younger wife, Emily, an aspiring concert pianist with an already robust career as a piano teacher. From his position as the piano tuner for the couple's music studio, a position that not only gave him intimate access to Emily's thoughts on music while she lived but also continued access into Lin's living space in the aftermath of her passing, the narrator becomes "an audience of one to [Lin's] grieving process." Though The Piano Tuner is premised on grief and on failed ambitions, at its most distilled, it is a love letter to music generally and to the piano specifically. The book is filled with anecdotes that seek to explain what makes music so appealing. These anecdotes vary between the rational, such as the didactic explanation that "each piano string is under 160 pounds of pressure, which comes to approximately twenty tons of pressure for all 230 strings"; to the poetic, such as the sentence immediately following, which personifies the piano, describing the "painful tension" that the instrument must withstand to create such a "melodious timbre." This idea of tension extends to the narrator's views on the piano itself, which exists as both machine and artistic collaborator. The narrator waxes poetic on the artisanal process involved in constructing a piano, suggesting that the many hands involved result in a unique identity to each instrument, a soul, that cannot be replicated. The narrator simultaneously finds this sentiment, though alluring, to be problematic. When he embarks on launching a used piano business in partnership with Lin, he frets as to whether reconstructed pianos maintain their soul or if they instead feel schizophrenic. As a book in translation, the parallels drawn between music, literature, and translation are taken to new heights. As described by the narrator, a good tuner and a good narrator, or storyteller, [End Page 86] both require precision and moderation, an ability to "find the right focus and pace [while refraining] from embellishment." A certain level of invisibility. The narrator muses that just as a good musical performance is remembered only by its performer...

You Can Tell a Prodigy From a Professional Musician

According to Feldman (1993), musical prodigies are expected to perform at the same high level as professional adult musicians and, therefore, are indistinguishable from adults. This widespread definition was the basis for the study by Comeau et al. (2017), which investigated if participants could determine whether an audio sample was played by a professional pianist or a child prodigy. Our paper is a replication of this previous study under more controlled conditions. Our main findings partly confirmed the previous findings: Comparable to Comeau et al.’s (2017) study (N = 51), the participants in our study (N = 278) were able to discriminate between prodigies and adult professionals by listening to music recordings of the same pieces. The overall discrimination performance was slightly above chance (correct responses: 53.7%; sensitivity d’ = 0.20), which was similar to Comeau et al.’s (2017) results of the identification task with prodigies aged between 11 and 14 years (approximately 54.6% correct responses; sensitivity approximately d’ = 0.13). Contrary to the original study, musicians and pianists in our study did not perform significantly better than other participants. Nevertheless, it is generally possible for listeners to differentiate prodigies from adult performers—although this is a demanding task.

Babukić the Vagabond and His Time by Miljenko Jergović

Reviewed by: Babukić the Vagabond and His Time by Miljenko Jergović Nada Petković Miljenko Jergović Vetrogonja Babukić i njegovo doba [ Babukić the Vagabond and His Time] Zagreb, Croatia: Fraktura, 2021. 377 Pp. ISBN 978-953-358-307-5 Thirty-something years into his literary career, Miljenko Jergovic surprised his readers with something quite outside the box—a picaresque novel Babukić the Vagabond and His Time. The author himself has acknowledged that he aspired to write a book that would be different from everything he had written before, certainly more frivolous and cheerful, something that would emerge from, as he said, "the semi-darkness from which he had written thus far." The book was published in 2021, although, according to Jergović, it had been in the making since 2010. Owing to circumstances in his personal life, in which, as he pointed out, "there was no place for hilarity, the manuscript was put aside." But then, several years of political crisis, including four turbulent years of Trump and the global pandemic that hit the world in 2020—all of which appeared surreal to the writer—inspired him to create something even more surreal: Babukić's world of apocalyptic cheerfulness. Over 380 pages divided into 10 chapters, with suggestive illustrations by Ivan Stanišić—quite appropriate for the genre—we are presented with a collection of diverse short narrative forms, unified by a solid framework of novelistic structure. The second structural level of the novel, i.e., its inner ring, consists of digressions, astonishing anecdotes, and meditations, which are either individual stories or introductions to more extensive narratives. Some critics compare the main character's adventures to those of idealistic wanderers such as Schweik or Don Quixote, while [End Page 175] others see closer resemblance to the heroes of fiction films, such as Victor Navorski in Spielberg's Terminal. The main character, Babukić, is a haunted traveler, constantly on the move, randomly buzzing about without getting anywhere. He is stuck among various starting points and destinations, in a transit zone between here and there, trapped in limbo. He left his native Zagreb at the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia (1991) and since then, he has literally and metaphorically lived on the road. His universe consists of airports and aircraft, in-between places where people spend great amounts of time waiting and observing others, as they move frantically in all directions. Babukić remains trapped not only spatially, behind the glass of airport buildings, but also temporally, stuck in the late 1980s and early 1990s—the time when he broke away from his real life and began a new existence in a different mode. This fake cosmopolitan and polyglot, as we discover throughout the novel, is contrasted to Jergović's description of socialist elites, military aristocracy, and general decadence before the collapse of the social order. Before the war, Babukić worked as a military analyst for the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), where he built his identity, reputation, and wealth. Having made his mistress (a young married woman) pregnant, and unable to face the consequences and responsibilities, he hastily fled his city, then the country, which would soon disappear along with the JNA, an institution of which he was a member. Portrayed as a man without qualities, devoid of affinity and ambition, scruples, and empathy, at the same time a clown and a demon, Babukić is infantile and conflicted, preoccupied with rituals and averse to emotional attachments. He is a man who, though possessing little knowledge, has an opinion about everything and needs to express it, however arrogantly. He is everywhere, constantly passing by others with whom he often collides, intensively communicating in all conceivable languages, not thinking about anyone, not remembering anyone. To compensate for having given up his personal history, Babukić is an intrusive collector of other people's stories. In proleptic flashes from his new, faux-nomadic life, we read about colorful encounters with diverse people, including an airport encounter with the supposedly melancholic Mohamed Atta; about a collision with Larisa Blum, a child musical prodigy; about the surreal scene in which he finds an undocumented Bosnian guest worker talking and hiding in a sandwich; about a clinch with the...

Child prodigies in Paris in the belle époque: Between child stars and psychological subjects.

This article considers the double role of child prodigies as child stars and psychological subjects in Paris in the Belle Époque. I argue that the celebrity status of child prodigies during this time contributed to their transformation into objects of scientific curiosity. The notions of innate talent and natural-born genius contributed heavily to stories of child prodigies within the public sphere; these stories also circulated in psychological accounts of such children. To illustrate this, I examine the case of Pepito Arriola, the so-called Spanish Mozart, in more detail. This musical prodigy toured Europe and America during the early 20th century, and when he was 3- and one-half years old, Charles Richet presented him at the Fourth International Psychology Congress (1900) in Paris. Arriola became the first virtuoso to be submitted to psychological examination, and he was subsequently examined in Berlin by the psychologist Carl Stumpf. This closer look at Pepito Arriola's case clarifies how popular culture and scientific research interacted in the making of a prodigy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd

Reviewed by: Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd Elizabeth Bush Todd, Traci N. Nina: A Story of Nina Simone; illus. by Christian Robinson. Putnam, 2021 [56p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781524737283 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781524737290 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 7-10 yrs Eunice Kathleen Waymon was a musical prodigy, playing Daddy’s “good-time jazz” on the old upright, then switching seamlessly to church music when her mother, a minister, came through the door. Such a talent couldn’t be ignored, even in 1930s North Carolina; although Mama’s white employer wouldn’t allow her son to play with a little Black girl, she nonetheless arranged for Eunice’s lessons, and by the end of high school Eunice, enraptured by Bach, was on her way to Juilliard. After rejection by the Curtis Institute, likely due to racial bias, a discouraged Eunice took her music down a new path—playing in noisy clubs, changing her name to Nina Simone to keep Mama from discovering her night job, and discovering her voice as a potent instrument for razor-edged social critique. Todd moves effortlessly between silky narration marked by subtle wordplay (“But fame was still new to Nina. She worked so hard to keep that spotlight lit, and she was exhausted. How could she join a movement when she could barely move?”), and pointed references to Simone’s musical activism (“But Nina was done being polite. As far as she could tell, politeness had gotten her people nothing”). Robinson’s collage compositions convey critical civil rights context in scenes playing out atop Simone’s grand piano strings, often fiery images that contrast with the pictures of Simone’s childhood origin story and her front-stage panache. Several shoutouts to specific songs are embedded in the text, but the generous endnotes that supplement the biography do not supply titles or recordings. That’s a missed opportunity, but nothing that will stop kids from pawing through grandparents’ LPs to hear the real deal. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

What Makes Musical Prodigies?

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies (aged 12–34) were compared to 35 musicians (aged 14–37) with either an early (mean age 6) or late (mean age 10) start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians (aged 14–34). All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened.

‘A Cunning Skill Did Lurk’: Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet

A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls’ school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich’s life and the cabinet’s needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.

Measuring the musical skills of a prodigy: A case study

While there is a strong interest in and fascination with music prodigies, very few measurements have been conducted on this rare phenomenon and very little empirical data exist. We document the case of LN, an 11-year-old music prodigy. We tested him on his cognitive skills (non-verbal reasoning and working memory), rhythm and melody discrimination skills, sight reading, improvisation, pitch accuracy, and musical memory. The data were then compared to various controls: a group of music students of the same age group (for cognitive and discrimination skills); three university music students with perfect pitch (for pitch accuracy and musical memory); and a music prodigy of similar age who was tested almost one hundred years ago (for pitch accuracy and musical memory). This is the first study that compares the test results of a contemporary music prodigy with the rare data of a prodigy studied in the early 20th century; the results are remarkably similar. LN's results on cognitive skills confirm the exceptional working memory often associated with prodigies. Most interestingly, musical ability results revealed a phenomenal level of melody discrimination, pitch accuracy and musical memory (skills related to auditory pitch memory), but just average rhythm skills, below average sight reading ability and he was not able to improvise. This suggests the potentially important role of exceptional auditory pitch memory in the development of musical prodigies.

‘Blind Tom’ abroad: race, disability, and transatlantic representations of Thomas Wiggins

Congenitally blind with cognitive disabilities that led to his diagnosis as an ‘idiotic genius’, nineteenth-century African-American musical prodigy Thomas ‘Blind Tom’ Wiggins was nonetheless one of the most popular performers of his age. This article examines the ways that Wiggins’ identity was constructed and mediated through transatlantic eyes through his introduction to British readers by American writer Rebecca Harding Davis and the publicity materials created from his 1866–1867 European tour. This article expands the geographical focus of Blind Tom scholarship, considering him as a transatlantic phenomenon positioned between boundaries based on his race, citizenship, disability, and talent.

Unfulfilled potential: The adult careers of former musical prodigies Ervin Nyiregyhazi, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and David Helfgott

This study investigated the careers of three former musical prodigies (i.e., Ervin Nyiregyhazi, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and David Helfgott) who made mature decisions to pursue music as a career, but did not achieve at the expected levels of distinction as adults. Many of the individual factors that may contribute to their relative lack of adult success appear to be related to factors other than natural ability, including a less than optimal level of psychosocial skills, restrictions imposed by society, and distractions from a complete commitment to music. Greater scholarly attention to the adult careers of musical prodigies is necessary to ensure that future generations of musical prodigies are better supported to realise their potential.

Nativity Shifts, Broken Dreams, and the New Latino South's Post-First Generation

For game three of the 2013 NBA finals, 11-year-old Sebastian de la Cruz, a musical prodigy born and raised in the great state of Texas, opened the June game with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner—a la mariachi. As the applause faded for the El Charro de Oro's [The Golden Mariachi's] performance, an outburst of racialized twittering hit the cloud. Although we watched the series of events that surrounded Sebastian de la Cruz's performances from thousands of miles away and despite the geographic distance between San Antonio and our communities, we recognized the hit-and-run commentary as all too familiar. In Georgia and the Carolinas, increasingly corrosive rhetoric surrounds Latino immigration—creating great obstacles to academic achievement including the navigation of a postcolonial nativist American landscape of K-12 education that continues to fail minoritized youth. Or, as Flores and Loss (2010) surmised, “Immigration policies and practices have been, and continue to be, riddled with contradictions. Close to the center of this sometimes bloody and always controversial issue is a fundamental, indeed enduring, question: Who is an American and what sorts of education should all Americans enjoy?” (p. 403). With these questions in mind, we argue that given an ongoing Latino nativity shift marked by 2010 Census analyses, the continued framing of post-first generation Latinos as perpetual foreigners whose academic achievement depends simply on the remediation of their English language proficiency is symptomatic a “national myopia” (P. R. Portes & Salas, 2014). We conclude with the overarching proposition that educational policy paradigms for Latino achievement in and beyond the shifting demographics of the U.S. South need to be grounded in additive models of cultural identity development that advance inter-culturally distributed cognitions, attitudes, and affective-behavioral patterns that result in achieving broader, richer identities across a variety of social contexts.

Richard Kogan, M.D., to Analyze Chopin’s Mind and Music

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MetingFull AccessRichard Kogan, M.D., to Analyze Chopin’s Mind and MusicNick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:31 Mar 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.4b31AbstractThe noted psychiatrist and pianist will discuss how the renowned Polish composer’s troubled mental state influenced his compositions.The duality that can manifest in a troubled mind has long fascinated Richard Kogan, M.D. Accomplished psychiatrist and pianist Richard Kogan, M.D., observes that mental illness can inspire extraordinary creativity.Richard Kogan, M.D.“Mental illness can lead to great disability, but it also can inspire extraordinary acts of creativity,” he said. For Kogan, an award-winning pianist, this intrapsychic conflict is especially poignant among composers, such as Frederic Chopin (1810-1849).Kogan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, and codirector of the Weill Cornell Human Sexuality Program. He studied piano at the Juilliard School and earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard.At age 20, Chopin left Poland to explore the culture and beauty of Western Europe; just one month later, the November 30 Uprising thrust his homeland into a decades-long period of political turmoil and oppression under czarist Russia. Forced to spend his entire adult life in exile, Chopin, already a musical prodigy, poured his hope and suffering into creating some of the most exceptional solo piano pieces ever written, particularly the polonaises and mazurkas that were a tribute to his homeland.But these masterpieces also coincided with a growing decline of his mental state. Worries about his distant home and family triggered panic attacks, phobias limited his public performances, and a diagnosis of tuberculosis preoccupied his mind with death and melancholy. Kogan will explore this relationship between Chopin’s psyche and his creative output in a special session at APA’s 2015 annual meeting titled “The Mind and Music of Chopin.” The discussion—which will also examine Chopin’s relationship with the brilliant and notorious French novelist George Sand during his later years—will be illuminated by performances of some of the composer’s most celebrated music.Kogan has been providing such melodious insights into the relationship between the inner turmoil and outer creativity of great composers for many years. He hopes his efforts help destigmatize mental illness by showing it in the positive context of the achievements of a renowned historical figure. The session will be held on Saturday, May 16, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Room 102, Level 100, North Building, Toronto Convention Centre. ■To watch a video of Kogan’s presentation at last year’s annual meeting, “Rachmaninoff and His Psychiatrist,” click here. ISSUES NewArchived

Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World by Howard Pollack (review)

Reviewed by: Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World by Howard Pollack Stuart J. Hecht Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World. By Howard Pollack . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012 . Cloth $39.95 , eBook $29.99 . 618 pages. When American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) suddenly died, the victim of gay bashing, the national shock was such as to merit a memorial concert in Lincoln Center with commemoratives coming from the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, and many more. With Bernstein at the piano, a bevy of stars recreated scenes from The Cradle Will Rock, including Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Barbara Harris, and original cast members Will Geer and Howard Da Silva. Jose Ferrer, Anita Ellis and Luigi Alva sang arias from Blitzstein’s operas. It was an evening of warm tributes. Yet today Blitzstein is largely forgotten. Author Howard Pollack, known for his ambitious biographies of George Gershwin and Aaron Copeland, here tackles the daunting task of resurrecting Blitzstein’s complex life and reputation in a densely detailed authoritative biography. Blitzstein is mostly known for two works: the Brecht-inspired, Federal Theatre-damning opera, The Cradle Will Rock, for which he wrote book, lyrics, and score; and his highly successful adaptation of the Brecht/Weill musical, The Threepenny Opera (1954), whose unexpected long run is sometimes credited for initiating the Off-Broadway theatre movement. Born to an affluent Jewish family in Philadelphia, Blitzstein was quickly recognized as a musical prodigy, studying with the likes of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He became a concert pianist and an erudite champion of avant-garde Modernist music. Throughout his life Blitzstein extolled the virtues (or failings) of many up-and-coming composers. A life-long Marxist, Blitzstein came to believe that good music could come from anywhere and anyone, not only highbrow aesthetes. He helped promote folk music—banjo songs, spirituals, labor songs—as much as he did the work of Copland, Stravinsky, or Prokofiev. Though gay, Blitzstein married Eva Goldbeck, herself an accomplished cultural critic. Eva’s premature death (at age 34) devastated Marc; it was she who had urged him to write The Cradle Will Rock, completed shortly thereafter. Complete success for his music eluded Blitzstein. Pollack recounts multiple instances of Blitzstein compositions winning critical acclaim, but never quite achieving renown, or of Blitzstein’s famously gifted mentee, Leonard Bernstein, so inspired by Blitzstein’s work that Blitzstein’s phrases take flight through Bernstein’s songs (including in West Side Story). Blitzstein found greater success writing music for theatre and film. Following The Cradle Will Rock, Blitzstein wrote rarely for purely musical venues. He scored theatrical productions for Orson Welles, John Houseman, and Lillian Hellman. He composed music for New Deal films and, drafted into the Army for World War II, composed for director William Wilder’s war documentaries. After the war Jerome Robbins enlisted Blitzstein [End Page 89] to write music for The Guests, marking Robbins’s choreographic debut with the New York City Ballet. Blitzstein also turned increasingly to Broadway. In 1949 he transformed Hellman’s The Little Foxes into the musical Regina, which enjoyed a modest run. Blitzstein followed this with Reuben Reuben and then, more notably, with Juno (1959), his musical version of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. At the time of his death Blitzstein was working on a musical about Sacco and Venzetti, for which he intended to write the music, lyrics and book. Pollack’s book brings to life this complex man and his work and does so with extraordinary detail and expertise. Pollack has made himself conversant in a broad range of settings and knowledge, equipping him to describe and assess the late composer’s times in their own context. He utilizes a lengthy list of sources, including Blitzstein’s letters, to achieve a close account of Blitzstein’s life accompanied by his views on seemingly everything: friends, lovers, the nature of music and theatre, politics, his travels, progressions of key events, and so forth. This proves critical for a biography of a man so loving and yet also so opinionated. Pollack’s careful research also uncovers gems from other prominent artists. For example, one from...

Movie Review: The Soloist

STUDENT REVIEW The Soloist is a 2009 American film based on the true story of Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard musical prodigy who has schizophrenia. The film is set in Los Angeles, California where an L.A. Times writer, Steve Lopez, has his life changed forever. The story begins featuring Lopez at his job frustrated with a dose of writer’s block. He is unable to find a lead or story captivating enough for his column and to save his job. As a result, he goes looking around the streets of L.A. for inspiration. While looking, he runs into Ayers who is homeless and making very little eye contact, speaking hurriedly, and repeating phrases about unrelated topics—winters in Cleveland, how he feels about the composer, Beethoven, and playing the cello. Almost immediately, Lopez believes he has found his story, and Ayers believes he has found a friend. They become acquainted and nevertheless inseparable as their unique relationship begins to develop.

The Music Library of a Noble Florentine Family: A Catalogue Raisonné of Manuscripts and Prints of the 1720s to the 1850s Collected by the Ricasoli Family Now Housed in the University of Louisville Music Library ed. by Susan Parisi (review)

The Music Library of a Noble Florentine Family: A Catalogue Raisonne of Manuscripts and Prints of the 1720s to the 1850s Collected by the Ricasoli Family Now Housed in the University of Louisville Music Library. Edited by Susan Parisi. Essays by Robert Lamar Weaver. Catalog compiled by John Karr, Caterina Pampaloni, and Robert Lamar Weaver. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music, no. 59.) Sterling Heights MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2012. [xiii, 482 p. ISBN 9780899901589. $85.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index.The Ricasoli music collection represents one of the few rare cases of an aristocratic collection that has been preserved as such and has not been dispersed by wars, bankruptcies, or other common tragedies. The thorough study and complete catalogue provided by Robert Lamar Weaver and his team is a valuable record of musical practices in eighteenth-century Florence as they can be deciphered in the music scores preserved in the collection.The book starts with two essays by Weaver. The first is on the historical context of the collection and includes a welldocumented attempt to reconstitute its history and genesis. Pietro Leopoldo Ricasoli Zaninchi (1778-1850) was the collection's main architect. A musical prodigy, he played the organ, harpsichord, piano forte, violin, flute, and violoncello. The first acquisitions relating to his collection are listed under the year 1795: three organ sonatas commissioned by Pietro Leopoldo from the Florentine composer Luigi Pelleschi, maestro di cappella and the family's harpsichord teacher. Pietro Leopoldo's collection comprises 139 items, a large part of which is organ music, the rest being sacred vocal music and instrumental music.The beginnings of the collection, however, can be traced back further. Weaver identifies two women from notable families linked to music as the ones who began the collection. The first was the mother of Pietro Leopoldo, Giulia Acciaiuoli (1756-86). She was a descendant of Filippo Acciaiuoli (1637-1700), an extremely important figure in the operas given in Rome at the very beginnings of the genre. He was an impresario, famous for the scenic devices he produced for several spectacular operas by Jacopo and Alessandro Melani, Bernardo Pasquini, and Pier Simone Agostini, among others, as well as for the intermedi given at the Tordinona, the first public theater in Rome during the 1670-71 season. Giulia played the harpsichord and probably started the first part of the collection. The second woman is Pietro Leo - poldo's wife, Lucrezia Rinunccini (born 1779). Her father was a descendant of Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist of the first Florentine operas, and her mother was a descendant of the Counts de' Bardi. She was an accomplished musician, playing several instruments, and kept her own collection (separate from her husband's), which contains only instrumental music (139 items, mostly sonatas and concertos). Another branch of the family, related to the baron Bettino Giuseppe Ricasoli Firidolfi(1739-1806), seems to have been responsible for the acquisition of operas and sacred music incorporated around 1831 in the Ricasoli Zaninchi library and preserved today in the collection.Weaver's second essay is devoted to the practice of music under Pietro Leopoldo Ricasoli. Apart from the private practice of instrumental music, Pietro Leopoldo organized performances of liturgical services in the family chapel from 1791 to 1796. For these performances he commissioned new music, mostly by Florentine composers such as Gaspero Sborgi (harpsichord teacher of Giulia, the mother of Pietro Leopoldo); Vincenzo Bianciardi, who composed ballets for the Cocomero Theater; Luigi Barbieri and Luigi Pelleschi, who were both engaged as teachers for the family's children; and Luigi Fanfani, maestro di cappella of the Duomo. The most important offices requiring music were the feasts of St. Aloysius Gonzaga ( June 21), St. Leopold (Novem - ber 15), and the Holy Relics (May 3). …

Odilon Redon's Violette Heymann

Odilon Redon's <i>Violette Heymann</i>

Johana Harris: A Biography (review)

Johana Harris: A Biography. By Ethel Paquin. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011. [xv, 256 p. ISBN 9780810877603. $65.] Illustrations. Ethel Paquin's Johana Harris: A Biography is the first full-length biography of the renowned pianist, teacher, and composer whose birth name was Duffey. The book is in some ways a psychobiography. Its first sentence is Mary Beula Aleta Duffey was born to a mother who didn't want her, and Beula/Johana's difficult relationship with her mother is a strong thread throughout the book. The writing style is highly engaging, at times somewhat breezy, and sometimes humorous, filled with casual expressions like a rock and a hard place (p. 1), You did not cross Laura if knew what was good for you (p. 1), and Men being men, marriage being marriage, and Catholic doctrine being what it was, before she knew it Laura was pregnant (p. 2). While Paquin does not hold back her interpretations of the events in Johana's life, she also provides strong supporting evidence for them. Paquin explains the book's origins in her preface. Research for the book was begun by Louise Spizizen (1928-2010), who in 1993 had put forth the disputed theory that Johana Harris was co-composer of some of Roy Harris's works. When she was unable to continue her research due to personal problems, Spizizen turned over her mate - rials, including the personal papers of Johana and Roy Harris, to Paquin. While Paquin does address the question of musical authorship (see especially pp. xi, xii, 34, and 58), her primary goal in the book is to answer a broader question: Why would Johana Harris, a musical prodigy of welldocumented genius, who had been the youngest student ever admitted to the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, who had been offered solo concert careers by management firms in this country and in Europe, who regularly received ovations when she performed, choose to marry Roy Harris and subordinate her own career in favor of advancing his? (p. xii) The theme of subordination is woven through this meticulous portrayal of Johana as both a woman and artist. While Johana's musical talent is made clear, the book is also quite intimate, filled with personal details including those surrounding her two abortions and miscarriage, and the role of mental and physical illnesses on various events. Paquin's narrative is storylike as she shows the interplay between Johana's relationships, music making, and academic life. Her relationships with several men are analyzed, with much attention given to that with her first husband, composer Roy Harris. Roy is not presented in attractive light. Paquin's description of Roy as an undependable, emotionally abusive, volatile man (p. xii) is reinforced throughout the book. Johana Harris's second husband, composer Jake Heggie, contributes a forward to the book and also addresses Johana's influence on Roy Harris (pp. viii-ix). Paquin draws upon papers and letters; newspaper reviews and articles; interviews recorded by Spizizen of Johana's colleagues, students, relatives, and friends; and fresh interviews of her own. She also draws upon the literature concerning Roy Harris, particularly Dan Stehman's Roy Harris: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Green - wood Press, 1991). Included are twentythree photos in black and white of Johana and others. Notes are provided for each of the book's twelve chapters. A minor complaint is that the book is difficult to navigate as no index is provided, and each of the chapter titles consists of no more than a date range. In chapter 1, December 1913 to May 1932, Beula/Johana's background and childhood in Canada, her musical development, and her move to New York at the age of twelve are thoroughly portrayed, along with her training at Juilliard and in Berlin, her teaching position of secondary piano at Juilliard, and her tremendous early successes as a performer, concertizing in the United States and in Canada. Chapter 2, June 1932 to October 1936, includes Beula's fiance David Dawson, the beginning of her long-term romantic relationship with Halfden Gregersen, Roy Harris's background, and her marriage to Roy Harris as his fourth wife. …