Beethoven's Symphony Research Articles

The Impact of Music on Orchid plants Growth in Polyhouse Environments

Nature and music, two seemingly disparate elements of human experience, are deeply interconnected in ways that resonate across cultures and time. Both evoke emotions, stir the soul, and inspire creativity, offering profound insights into the human condition and our relationship with the world around us. In essence, nature and music are two expressions of the same universal impulse—the longing to connect with something greater than ourselves, to find beauty and meaning in the world around us. Whether we're listening to the songs of birds at dawn or the symphonies of Beethoven, we are reminded of our place in the vast tapestry of creation, where every note, every sound, is a testament to the wonder and mystery of existence. By carefully considering the environmental factors and designing experiments that account for them, researchers can gain a better understanding of how music influences plant growth and optimize its use in agricultural and horticultural practices. This research paper investigates the potential effects of music on orchid growth within polyhouse environments. Orchids are renowned for their delicate beauty and are cultivated worldwide, often in controlled environments like polyhouses. While studies have explored the influence of various environmental factors on orchid growth, the impact of music remains relatively unexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how exposure to music may affect the growth, development, and overall health of orchids in polyhouse conditions. The research employs a combination of experimental methods, including controlled trials, measurements of plant growth parameters, and analysis of physiological indicators. Additionally, the study considers factors such as the type of music, frequency, volume, and duration of exposure. The findings of this research contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship between plants and their acoustic environment, with potential implications for optimizing orchid cultivation practices in polyhouse settings.

Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural ed. by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco

Reviewed by: Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural ed. by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco Walter Aaron Clark Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural. Edited by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco. (Comares música.) Granada: Comares, 2021. [xi, 397 p. ISBN 9748413690520 (paperback), €33.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography. Ludwig van Beethoven's legacy is not one that we associate with Spain. At least it is not immediately apparent what sort of influence he and his music might have exercised on Spanish composers, concert artists, and audiences. We associate Beethoven with the genre of the symphony, but symphonic organizations were slow to develop in Spain during the 1800s, and Beethoven's symphonies only gradually gained traction with concert audiences there. And Spanish composers themselves never cultivated the symphony with any notable results. True, they composed an abundance of orchestral music, especially tone poems, ballets, and concertos, many of which have found a secure niche in the canonical repertoire. But one strains to think of a single Spanish symphony that has achieved the stature of Isaac Albéniz's Catalonia, Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat, or Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. For whatever reason, Spanish composers were simply not drawn to the musical abstractions of the symphony—which is not to say they never composed them. Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (1806–1826) was a young composer whose promising career as a symphonist was cut short by a premature demise. And though they are far better known for their zarzuelas and operas, both Tomás Bretón and Ruperto Chapí essayed symphonic works. Joaquín Turina's Sinfonia sevillana (1920) also comes to mind, though it may be the exception that proves the rule, since it is as much a three-movement tone poem as it is a symphony. And yet it should not come as a complete surprise that the Iberian penetration of the Austro-Germanic heritage of which Beethoven was the crowning glory is on full display here. Joseph Haydn was hugely popular in Spain, and his Die Sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze was an orchestral work commissioned by the city of Cadiz in 1786. And in the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner's operas and operatic philosophies were adopted and adapted by many admirers, including Felipe Pedrell, Albéniz, and Enrique Granados, among others. To be sure, this heritage was not confined to symphonies and operas. As this volume makes perfectly clear, the impact of Beethoven's chamber music and piano sonatas was immense, felt first within the salons of the elite before it made its way to concert venues populated by a growing middle class. Thus, Beethoven, a larger-than-life symbol of Viennese classicism and incipient romanticism, is not out of place in Iberian music history, and it was about time that someone undertook to examine his undoubted impact in both Spain and Portugal. That someone is Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, a leading musicologist in Spain and professor at the Universidad de La Rioja in Logroño. She assembled a dream team of scholars for this trailblazing collection of essays, which will be of great interest and value not only to Hispanists but also to anyone interested in the global scope of Beethoven interpretation and reception. The editor's insightful introduction concerns issues of reception, discourses, and canonicity relative to Beethoven. As she astutely points out, "Almost two centuries after his death, Beethoven is today the most-programmed composer, an icon of practices associated with 'classical music' and one that constitutes a model for certain attitudes and behaviors, an example of an idea of emancipated humanity that was defined at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 1, my trans.). She then establishes the necessary tenor and parameters for the volume, which offers a generous collection of twenty essays, divided into nine major parts, by twenty-five scholars. This collection is the outgrowth of a 2020 [End Page 393] conference dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth and organized by the "Música y Prensa" group of the Sociedad Española de Musicología. Yet, as the editor advises, these...

The Long Silence

The Long Silence Richard Dale Sjoerdsma (bio) EDITOR'S COMMENTARY One ought every day at least to hear a little song,read a good poem, see an excellent picture, and,if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1 Sunday, March 15, 2020. My church choir was prepared to sing Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine" at morning worship service, and Mary and I enthusiastically anticipated attending the next in our Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Sunday afternoon concert series. While challenging to the average church choir (and mine may be more average than most), "Cantique" has musical and textual depths, enhanced by an excruciatingly beautiful melody, that render it an uplifting spiritual and aesthetic experience for singer and listener. The MSO concert was to have included Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, a monument of Western music that, even after many hearings, continues to stir the soul through its inherent truth and beauty. Alas, in response to the March 11 WHO official determination that the world had been plunged into a COVID-19 pandemic, both worship service and orchestra concert were cancelled. What initially was thought to be only a minor gap in our cultural life soon became a gaping abyss. Worship took place at the altar of a computer desk or, in clement weather, in the sanctuary of one's automobile. The remainder of the MSO season was cancelled, as, unprecedentedly, was eventually the entire 2020–21 series. The long silence began. A brief but welcome interruption in the silence occurred on May 23, 2021, as a chamber ensemble version of the MSO offered a live, invitation-only concert for subscribers. A palpable joy, an almost giddy excitement, exuded from masked and separated listeners in response to an all-English concert that featured Vaughan Williams's Concerto Grosso for Strings and Holst's St. Paul's Suite Op. 29, no. 2, among others. Several weeks later, in lieu of our normal church choir, I sang at a worship service in a double quartet, to considerable applause from congregants. Finally, on October 3, 2021, we gleefully attended an inaugural MSO concert of a full 2021–22 season, a program that included Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Duke Ellington's New World a-Comin,' and Stravinsky's Suite from The Firebird. The long silence ended. Among many lessons from the pandemic—some learned, some remaining to be learned, and, lamentably, some ignored—an important one is the deep human need for truth and beauty, in community, anecdotal evidence for which, I think, is documented above. In an address to the audience before stepping on the podium to conduct the opening concert of the current season, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Riccardo Muti reminded us [End Page 315] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. Franz Schubert. Impromptu, Op. 90, no. 4, mm. 46–49. that culture is not entertainment. Culture affects our souls, minds, and interrelationships, and, as the maestro insists, we need enrichment, beauty, live music. 2 Recent years have demonstrated that a lack of culture, a neglect of beauty, can damage and inevitably coarsen a society. Exploring the ample evidence for this would lead down dark paths that I choose not to traverse at this time, although it is an axiom we forget to our ultimate abasement. Although it was not my intent when I began to draft this essay, it was serendipitous that at the outset I linked worship and music, that is, spirituality and aesthetic, as the core of my commentary. English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence said, "The human soul needs beauty even more than it needs bread." 3 A need for beauty and music carries with it a need for its inherent spiritual and aesthetic truth. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. —John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Art is a living thing that shows us truth. Sociologist Frank Furedi asserts that "[t]hroughout history the quest for truth constituted one of the most positive manifestations of our human qualities," citing Robert Browning, who wrote that "There is no truer truth...

A Multi-channel Anechoic Orchestra Recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 op. 93

A Multi-channel Anechoic Orchestra Recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 op. 93

A Multi-channel Anechoic Orchestra Recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 op. 93

A Multi-channel Anechoic Orchestra Recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 op. 93

In memoriam: Paolo Sassone-Corsi.

In memoriam: Paolo Sassone-Corsi.

Recognizing individual concert halls is difficult when listening to the acoustics with different musical passages.

This article presents a listening experiment in which the listeners' task was to recognize the acoustics of a seat in a specific concert hall. Stimuli included two short passages extracted from a Beethoven symphony and samples of a solo violin auralized to four real concert halls. In each trial, listeners were presented with a reference and four alternatives with one correct match. In the "same" condition, the reference and the alternatives contained the same source sound. In the "different" condition, the source sounds were different musical passages but always of the same sound type, that is, symphonic music or solo violin. Results show that on average listeners could recognize the halls when the task was performed with the same source sound but had difficulty when listening to different sounds. The patterns of erroneous responses exhibited confusion between particular hall pairs and corresponded well to the values and just-noticeable-differences of the traditional objective room acoustic parameters. While the type of music is previously well known to influence the perception of concert hall acoustics, the present results indicate that even minor changes in the source sound content may have a strong impact on the ability to recognize the acoustics of individual halls.

Hierarchical multidimensional scaling for the comparison of musical performance styles

Quantification of stylistic differences between musical artists is of academic interest to the music community, and is also useful for other applications such as music information retrieval and recommendation systems. Information about stylistic differences can be obtained by comparing the performances of different artists across common musical pieces. In this article, we develop a statistical methodology for identifying and quantifying systematic stylistic differences among artists that are consistent across audio recordings of a common set of pieces, in terms of several musical features. Our focus is on a comparison of ten different orchestras, based on data from audio recordings of the nine Beethoven symphonies. As generative or fully parametric models of raw audio data can be highly complex, and more complex than necessary for our goal of identifying differences between orchestras, we propose to reduce the data from a set of audio recordings down to pairwise distances between orchestras, based on different musical characteristics of the recordings, such as tempo, dynamics, and timbre. For each of these characteristics, we obtain multiple pairwise distance matrices, one for each movement of each symphony. We develop a hierarchical multidimensional scaling (HMDS) model to identify and quantify systematic differences between orchestras in terms of these three musical characteristics, and interpret the results in the context of known qualitative information about the orchestras. This methodology is able to recover several expected systematic similarities between orchestras, as well as to identify some more novel results. For example, we find that modern recordings exhibit a high degree of similarity to each other, as compared to older recordings.

РОМАНТИЧНИЙ СТИЛЬ У МУЗИЦІ ТА ЙОГО ВІДОБРАЖЕННЯ У ФОРТЕПІАННІЙ ТВОРЧОСТІ Й. БРАМСА

Серед жанрів інструментальної музики найбільш важливою спадщиною виявилася сонатна форма. Вона отримала сильний поштовх для розвитку, починаючи від захоплення музикантами бетховенським симфонізмом. Велика роль драматургії сонатної форми в музиці епохи романтизму незаперечна, так само, як і вплив бетховенської творчості на піднесення сонатної форми. В ХІХ столітті в сонатній формі її творцями продемонстровано всеохоплюючий вплив на творчість різних композиторів і тим самим доведено значення цього стилю в музиці того періоду. Із зазначеного автор робить висновок, що романтизм став своєрідною відповіддю Просвітництву, його культу раціоналізму. Для романтичного світогляду був характерний внутрішній конфлікт між мрією і дійсністю. Романтизм протиставляв життєвій прозі ідеальне царство духу. Саме музика в епоху романтизму посідала одне з провідних місць у мистецтві. Сформований на початку ХІХ століття романтизм у музиці розвивався в тісному зв’язку з іншими течіями в живопису, літературі, театрі. Сублімація всіх видів мистецтв у цей період створила безсумнівний відбиток і на розвиток музичних форм у фортепіанній літературі.Романтичній музиці був притаманний глибокий інтерес до особистості людини. Це знайшло вираження в розкритті особистого драматизму, яка у композиторів-романтиків мала ще й відтінок автобіографічності. Посилена увага композиторів-романтиків до людських почуттів призвела до зміни образів і жанрів. Лірика отримала панівне значення, образи любові стали переважати.Ідея синтезу мистецтв у період романтизму стала основною в естетиці творів цього періоду та яскраво проявилась у всіх існуючих мистецьких творах того часу.

Classical Music Therapy as The Intervention to Relieve Headache in A Meningitis Patient

<div><p class="Keywords"><strong>Objective</strong>: Headache is a manifestation of inflammatory response from meningeal infection. Headache may affect client physically and psychologically thus it requires treatment. This paper aimed to analyze implementation of classical music therapy as non-pharmacological intervention in relieving headache in patient with meningitis.</p><p class="Keywords"><strong>Methods</strong>: This was a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of classical music therapy to relieve patient’s headache. The intervention was implemented for 3 days long by playing Beethoven Symphony 6. The headache was evaluated by using McGill Pain Questionnaire.</p><p class="Keywords"><strong>Results</strong>: The result indicated a decrease in pain intensity from score of 8 to 6 in the third day of implementation.</p><p class="Keywords"><strong>Conclusion</strong>: Classical music therapy relieved headache in patient with meningitis. Nurses are suggested to implement classical music therapy on client with headache in order to relieve and alleviate pain.</p></div><strong>Key words</strong>: Classical music, meningitis, pain

Historical performance

Howard Mayer Brown claimed in the ‘Performing practice’ article for the 1980 New Grove that there was continuity between the late 18th-century and present-day performance and that, however fascinating it might be, there were ‘almost insuperable’ obstacles in the way of our performing Beethoven symphonies with the instrumental resources available to the composer. Within two years, the Hanover Band had begun issuing their recordings (with Monica Huggett, then Roy Goodman) of what was to be a complete Beethoven cycle on period instruments. Sets by Jaap Schröder with the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Christopher Hogwood and The Academy of Ancient Music, and Roger Norrington with The London Classical Players were to follow before the end of the decade. Brown’s misstep is mentioned at least four times in The Cambridge encyclopedia of historical performance in music (CEHPM)—in the Editors’ Preface, in Colin Lawson’s article on ‘Historically informed performance’, in Alexander Evan Bonus’s on Beethoven, and in Kate van Orden’s appreciative entry on Brown himself. As van Orden points out, Brown’s contribution to early music scholarship (and, for that matter, to Early Music) was enormous—so it is ironic that that this wonderful and generous-spirited scholar seems best remembered for a surprising lack of foresight into the directions that interest in historically inspired performance were taking us.

Carl Czerny's Mechanical Reproductions

This article reassesses the “mechanical” style of playing featured in Carl Czerny's pedagogical works and keyboard arrangements—specifically, the Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School, op. 500 (1839), its supplementary text Letters to a Young Lady (ca. 1840), and the four-hand transcription of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D Minor, op. 125 (the “Choral”). The first part of the article situates opus 500 within the larger pedagogical milieu of Biedermeier music culture and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's progressivist educational reforms, exploring the way it tasked predominantly women amateurs with assembling basic finger sensations in an exercise-by-exercise—“progressive”—fashion. I propose that this cumulative logic reflects an early-century epistemic norm—what Friedrich Kittler dubs a “mechanical program” of assembly and augmentation. The second part considers Czerny's transcription of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth from the perspective of ludo-musicology and cultural techniques media analysis, outlining the reductive and replicative—“reproductive”—techniques by which Czerny accommodated his former teacher's work to the hands he shaped in the private sphere. I argue that his pedagogies and transcriptions were recursively interrelated. Czerny was simultaneously a mechanic of the hand pedagogically and a mechanical reproducer of symphonies transcriptively, creating a multivalent corpus that forces us to rethink the media-theoretical concept of “mechanical reproduction” vis-à-vis “Discourse Network 1800.”

Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories

### FRANCESCA BRITTAN and CARMEL RAZ > Fiction may struggle to hold us spellbound in the manner of music, but its prompting of more diverted states of mind, and its depictions of the richness and freedom found in the sloppiness of drifting thought, suggests how constricted a world can be that

James Joyce and Absolute Music by Michelle Witen

Reviewed by: James Joyce and Absolute Music by Michelle Witen Simon Haworth (bio) JAMES JOYCE AND ABSOLUTE MUSIC, by Michelle Witen. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018. xiii + 299 pp. $114.00 cloth, $89.39 ebook. Michelle Witen begins her fascinating and far-reaching new study of Joyce by establishing the inseparability of Joyce's literary and musical lives and then precisely and assuredly overhauls our perspective on this aspect of his literary output. The work initially concerns itself with the changes to music during the nineteenth century in different ways, principally the gradual aesthetic shift from Romanticism into modernism. Later, Witen's attentions narrow to the development of the fugue as a musical form, which was not truly defined until the sixteenth century when "Gioseffo Zarlino first differentiated the fuga into the categories of fuga legata and fuga sciolta, denoting the sustained flight of the canon and the segmented flight of the fugue respectively" (115). Witen is specifically interested in how Joyce understood the fugue form and in adjusting critical discrepancies and misconceptions in the way he transposed it into literature in Ulysses's "Sirens" episode. She rigorously locates and contextualizes the writing of this section, one that has already been the subject of much discordant cross-examination, by devoting significant space to a necessary musical reorientation of most of Joyce's oeuvre and its innately musical predispositions. That Joyce's use of musical structure and thinking was a progressive action within his works is established early in Witen's text. The book moves intelligently and chronologically to promote her ideas about how literature and music were sensorily and artistically parallel in many areas of Joyce's creative life and consequently found expression in his literary output. For Witen, Joyce's debt to music in his writing runs much deeper than simply alluding to and referencing songs or other forms of music. Rather, her stance is that Joyce's musical involvement was deeply theoretical and formal, even in works such as Chamber Music and Dubliners.1 Scraps of correspondence add narrative color from the outset and enhance her approach. At this point, [End Page 444] we see communications with Anthony Burgess, George Antheil, and Joyce himself (3, 4, 6, 7). After some consideration of Joyce's vocal abilities and notable scholarship investigating allusions to song in his writing, Witen leans firmly on her fugal line of inquiry: "[m]y interest is to interrogate Joyce's claim of having written the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses as a fuga per canonem, and his choice of the fugue as his vehicle" (2). Chapter 1, "Toward a Modernist Condition of Absolute Music" (17-82), like all of the chapters, is divided into helpful subsections. This is a sweeping consideration of the dramatic changes in music during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Included here is effective visual attention to changes in concert-hall arrangements and etiquette as concert halls, orchestras, performances, and music itself evolved. The chapter's combination of historical, technological, aesthetic, and philosophical angles proves extremely illuminative. Witen is attuned to the similarly (r)evolutionary sonic and compositional changes in music as it transitioned into the era of the great Romantic composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Antonín Dvořák. She also devotes significant space to E. T. A. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, which became "[not only] a landmark in styles of reviewing music, but it also, for the first time, articulated the presence of a debate surrounding instrumental music and the hierarchies within music" (21).2 For Joyce, the musical aspect of language accrued complexity as his writing developed, and the idea of absolute music internalized and subsumed by a literary work assumed a more elevated hierarchical significance and primacy by the time of his later works such as Finnegans Wake, the subject of Witen's concluding chapter. It is clear that Witen is treating Joyce as a composer as much as a writer, but which came first: composer-writer or writer-composer? Also instructive in the first chapter is Witen's consideration of nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic thought concerning music...

Cannon-fever: Beethoven, Waterloo and the Noise of War

Originally written to commemorate the Duke of Wellington's victory over Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain on 21 June 1813, Wellington's Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria (Wellington's Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria), Op. 91 became, in the months following the Battle of Waterloo, ‘a national stock-piece’ (Literary Gazette, 1817, 91). Based around a simple, not to say simplistic, opposition between French and English musical motifs – ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ for the British, and ‘Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre’ (a tune better known in English as ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’) – the symphony moves towards a carefully notated clash of arms, involving rapid bursts of musketry and cannon fire from opposing orchestral ‘sides’, and rhythmic simulations of galloping cavalry. However, as contemporary accounts of performances of the symphony reveal, the excessive frequency of the loud cracks, bangs and crashes, often deployed by live artillery, made for uncomfortable listening, evoking Goethe's description of the disorientating effects of ‘cannon-fever’ (kanonenfieber). In its activation of the ‘noise’ of war, a mimetic dissonance at odds with the formal unities of the heroic style, Beethoven's symphony thus subverts its assumed status as a pièce d'occasion while also emphasising the sense in which the sounds of battle exceed the regulatory parameters of the Kantian sublime. This article argues that although the Wellington symphony was denounced by critics as a ‘minor’ piece, it highlights an emergent note of discontent in Beethoven's music with the appropriation of music for triumphalist ends.

Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision by Lewis Lockwood

Reviewed by: Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision by Lewis Lockwood Bryan Proksch Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision. By Lewis Lockwood. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. [ xxvi, x285 p. ISBN 9780393076448 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9780393353853 (paperback), $18.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes, musical examples on external website. My first thoughts on seeing this book—Lewis Lockwood knows his Beethoven, but do we really need another middlebrow overview of the symphonies?—were evidently predictable given the author's immediate justification in the book's preface. The greatest Beethoven scholars of every generation have seen fit to write exactly this type of book, or "series of historically informed critical essays" as he would have it (p. xv). It is no overstatement to acknowledge that the scope of Lockwood's knowledge and expertise warrant adding his name to a list that includes Hector Berlioz, George Grove, and Donald Tovey. At the same time, Lockwood also risks having his book end up as the newest addition to a [End Page 100] much larger stack of forgettable tomes rehashing the same worn ideas. While I cannot predict where this book will ultimately reside, I am happy to say that it has a better chance of beating the odds and ending up on the short list of must-reads than I initially thought. The appeal of this book, or at least the way that it most clearly distinguishes itself from the others out there, lies in Lock -wood's unsurpassed knowledge of Beethoven's sketchbooks and conversation books. He made a career out of deciphering a significant percentage of these notoriously difficult documents, most notably in his Beethoven's "Eroica" Sketchbook: A Critical Edition co-edited with Alan Gosman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1992). In the present book, he redirects his efforts to create a compelling narrative that speaks effectively to the graduate or even undergraduate student, with the potential of serving as a tantalizing first introduction to both Beethoven's creative process and the relevance of sketch studies to our understanding of these works. The value of primary sources to Lock -wood's viewpoint is most evident in his discussion of the Third Symphony. He argues in this chapter that the "heroic" programmatic qualities were not a part of the original "ur-Eroica" plans laid out by Beethoven in 1802, but that they quickly entered the picture once sketching began in earnest. He also notes that the finale was not a problem for Beethoven in this symphony as it was with many of the others; rather it was "the anchor against which he composed the rest of the symphony" (p. 75) rooted as it is in his "Eroica" variations, op. 35. Lockwood recognizes the apparent contradiction in the heroic narrative, in that the final two movements of the symphony seem not to fit so neatly with the first two movements, which have been perceived as strongly programmatic. He is almost too quick to explain away the difficulties by stating that "Beethoven was not writing a sequential biography of a single hero, but composing a transcendent symphony of the subject of the heroic that would offer different perspectives on this ideal" (p. 71). Why revert to a traditional interpretation when the documents appear to hint at a number of viable alternatives? Clearly there is room for a heated in-class discussion on how the weakest movement programmatically can somehow serve as the conceptual cornerstone of the entire work. The majority of the symphonies offer Lockwood similar opportunities to hear the familiar masterworks anew. The Eighth Symphony's origins as a piano concerto (a manuscript source for a cadenza survives) offer a refreshingly new take that avoids the traditional idea that the work is an updating of Haydn's humorous rhetoric. Indeed, his entire discussion of the Eighth points to its innovative features rather than to a harkening back to Classicism. Beethoven's increasing deafness virtually forced him to convert the work to a different genre, Lockwood argues. But there is room for broader discussions of implications of genre and the awkward way in which this work has almost always...

Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise by Douglas W. Shadle

Orchestrating the Nation: Nineteenth-Century Symphonic Enterprise. By Douglas W. Shadle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. [ix, 330 p. ISBN 9780199358644 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780199358656 (e-book), varies.] Illustrations, music examples, tables, index, companion website. Douglas W. Shadle's introduction to Orchestrating the Nation: Nineteenth-Century Symphonic Enterprise begins with a compelling question: Why do orchestras play so many German symphonies? (p. 1). He opens this discussion with an account of the primacy of Ludwig van Beethoven during the nineteenth century. symphonies of Beethoven still hold a great deal of cultural capital, often linked with large-scale celebrations, commemorations, and memo rializations. Shadle's Orchestrating the Nation provides insight into how the ideological association between established German culture and burgeoning culture influenced composers, performers, conductors, and critics during the nineteenth century, with lasting effects on the present-day musical landscape. Shadle divides his discussion of symphonists into pre- and post-Civil War composers. For the antebellum period, he devotes three chapters to specific composers: Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), a Bohemian immigrant that Shadle nicknames the Hapless Wanderer; William Henry Fry (1813-1864), the Operatic Translator; and George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898), the American Stalwart. Prior to these three chapters, Shadle dedicates a chapter, The Launch of the Enterprise, to describing how the United States suffered from what Laurence Buell and other scholars termed a postcolonial anxiety in the early nineteenth century (p. 17). Developing a musical culture was part of the process of nation building. As the pinnacle of cultural production, the symphony was considered to be the primary means for fostering new voices, as opposed to establishing a copy of European music making. Shadle also points out that the European debate regarding descriptive or narrative symphonies (program music) also influenced the compositional output of composers. An important connecting persona is the music critic John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893). In 1852, he created his own platform, Dwight's Journal of Music, to disseminate his Germanophile attitudes regarding the musical development of the United States. After receiving positive reinforcement from Richard Pohl in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Dwight became an arbiter of taste, never investing in the idea that Americans could create anything as ideologically superior as the Germans produced. He took on all of the composers Shadle discusses in this book and rarely gave more than a pat on the head to composers trying to compete with European monuments. Ideologically important ensembles and conductors that influenced the careers of these musicians are discussed throughout the book, including the Philharmonic Society of New York, the Germania Musical Society, the Boston Academy of Music, and later, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Philharmonic Society of New York, formed in 1842, eventually became the New York Philharmonic and made performing works by composers part of its mission. Formed in March of 1848, the Germania Musical Society (a group of Berlin musicians) resolved to form an egalitarian orchestra and departed for the United States 'in order to enflame and stimulate in the hearts of these politically free people, through numerous performances of our greatest instrumental composers' (p. 29). French conductor Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860), who arrived in New York in 1853, made choices that greatly impacted the ways in which audiences perceived symphonic music. According to Shadle, Jullien's orchestra provided audiences with models of cooperation and the republican value of subordinating the self to the common good (p. 116). chapter Rivalry of Nations sheds more light on the rift between pro- and anti-German attitudes. …

Adorno's Symphonic Space-Time and Beethoven's Time Travel in Space

Theodor W. Adorno's “theory of the symphony” is modeled on Beethoven's heroic symphonies; these works form the basis for Adorno's arguments against the broadcast of symphonies on radio. A “radio symphony,” he claims, is not the same as the real thing and fails to deliver the true meaning of the music. The arguments are based on a peculiar configuration of space and time in the symphonies in which the temporal dimensions are so compressed that they form a spatial moment—an Augenblick that engulfs the listener in its metaphysical enclosures. Why should anyone believe such a peculiar theory? More important, does Beethoven's music have anything to say about it?

Robert Schumann, Serious Virtuosity, and the Rhetoric of the Sublime

In several essays from the first half of the nineteenth century, Robert Schumann and other music critics used the rhetoric of the sublime when describing select, unconventionally intense virtuosic showpieces and performances, evoking this category’s associations with overpowering, even fearsome experiences and heroic human qualities. These writings formed one strand of a larger discourse in which musicians and critics attempted to describe and identify instances of virtuosity that supposedly rejected superficiality and aimed at serious aesthetic values: in the nineteenth-century imagination, the sublime abnegated mere sensuous pleasure; inspired a mixture of attraction, admiration, and trepidation; and implied both masculinity and intellectual cultivation. It offered a framework for self-consciously elevating virtuosity rooted in the sheer intensity and, in some cases, perceived inaccessibility of particular works and performances. Schumann extended the mantle of sublimity to Liszt during the virtuoso’s 1840 Leipzig and Dresden concerts. Critics described three of Schumann’s own 1830s piano showpieces using the rhetoric of the sublime, comparing the finale of the Concert sans orchestre, Op. 14, to violent forces of nature to illustrate the way its virtuosic passagework disrupts and engulfs lyrical themes within an anomalous formal structure. They also linked the Toccata, Op. 7, and Etudes symphoniques, Op. 13, to Beethoven, hinting at the ways in which Schumann alluded to or modeled these showpieces on Beethoven symphonies. These episodes in Schumann’s career broaden our understanding of the contexts in which nineteenth-century writers on music evoked the sublime, showing how they described this quality not only in symphonies and large choral works but also in solo performances and showpieces. They illuminate the politics of the sublime, revealing its significance for nineteenth-century thinking about the cultural prestige that particular musical works and performances could attain.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score by Walt Disney

Reviewed by: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score by Walt Disney Daniel Batchelder Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score. Music by Frank E. Churchill, lyrics by Larry Morey, and additional underscore by Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith. Limited edition digital replica. (Disney Music Legacy Libraries.) Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015. [Prologue, p. 4–5; score, p. 6–205; epilogue, p. 206–7; acknowledgements, p. 207. ISBN 978-14950-0872-6. $300.] Conventional musicological wisdom regards a score—say, that of a Beethoven symphony—as a blueprint of performable musical events. Scholars may subject these texts to stylistic analysis with an eye toward uncovering aspects of the composer’s musical thought process: why this chord, this rhythm, this instrument? Though certainly not without value, it is precisely this monolithic and quintessentially romantic approach that Ben Winters decries in a 2007 article on film-music scholarship (“Catching Dreams: Editing Film Scores for Publication,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 1 [2007]: 115–40). While the availability of published film scores has dramatically increased in recent years, Winters asserts that the auteurcentric methodology such documents enable distorts the emphasis on the composer’s creative autonomy by failing to account for the fact that scoring a film is a highly collaborative and fluid process. A film composer’s musical decisions are tempered by innumerable exigencies, from storyboard and sound-mixing concerns to editorial decisions that can leave feet of scored footage on the cutting room floor. This unavoidable indeterminacy, writes Winters (p. 120), “leaves us with a dilemma: how can we present a film score editorially in a way that both is useful for musicologists and yet acknowledges the often pluralistic, Text-like [in the Barthesian sense] complexities of the score?” An appealing solution to this dilemma has arrived in a surprising form. In late summer of 2015, the Walt Disney Company produced a beautifully bound, glossy facsimile of the manuscript “master score” to its 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While it cannot claim to be the first published film score—or even the first publicly available animated film score, given Ries & Erler’s edition of Wolfgang Zeller’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed from 1926 (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed: Musik zum Lotte Reiniger-Stummfilm, für kleines Orchester bearbeitet von Jens Schubbe, 5 vols. [Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2008])—this document is the first of its kind in many ways. Published by Hal Leonard and limited to a print run of 400 numbered copies, the edition was compiled and produced by a Disney-owned internal organization known as the Disney Music [End Page 157] Legacy Libraries (hereinafter, MLL). According to an explanatory two-page epilogue printed in the edition’s final pages, the MLL is an archival project dedicated to providing “a comprehensive and elegant resource solution for documenting and retrieving all phases of the [Disney studio’s] music scoring, contracting, and recording process” (p. 206). Since 2014, the MLL’s formidable parent company has exploited the project’s commercial potential with the Disney Music Emporium’s Legacy Collection, offering lavishly produced soundtrack recordings on compact disc and vinyl, complete with deleted songs and extensive liner notes (Walt Disney Records, “Disney Music Emporium: The Legacy Collection,” http://www.disneymusicemporium.com/the-legacy-collection [accessed 18 May 2016]). This score, however, signals the collection’s first foray into printed music. The publication’s use of the phrase “master score” compels some explanation. Though creating the score for a live-action film requires, as noted above, close and consistent collaboration between composers, editors, screenwriters, sound engineers, and the like, this process is magnified tenfold in the case of an animated film: every sound, utterance, and gesture must be carefully planned and organized in advance in order to ensure proper audiovisual synchronization. Though modern technology has streamlined and simplified this process, in the mid-1930s the creation of an eighty-three-minute animated film represented a gargantuan undertaking. By this time, however, the Disney studio had been at the forefront of the animation industry for nearly a decade, due in part to its constant experimenting with and implementation of new equipment...