Tone Poem Research Articles

The Imposter by Jurgis Karnavicius: A Ballet-Fantasy on a Historical Plot

One of the first Lithuanian composers to work in the genre of ballet was Jurgis Karnavičius (1884–1941). In 1928 he introduced a choreographic scene based on his tone poem The Lithuanian Rhapsody, that engaged interest in the genre of ballet among Lithuanian composers. Afterwords Karnavičius composed four full-length ballets that were offered to a variety of European theatres. Unfortunately, due to the events of World War II, there had not been any production of the ballet organized. Fortunately, the musical material of the ballet was preserved, including The Imposter (1940). The libretto written by Elena Pavlovna France is based on historical events in Russian history of the first decade of the 17th century — the beginning of the Time of Troubles. The main characters of the ballet are the future tsar-imposter False Dmitry I and Marina Mniszech, whose fates are tied to both Russian, Polish and Lithuanian history. The ballet was influenced by the works of great Russian composers, such as Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky and A Life for the Tsar by Mikhail Glinka, most specifically, their “Polish acts.” At the same time, The Imposter added new plot motives that allow us to see the uprising of False Dmitry from a different perspective. Karnavičius’ ballet continues to be preserved in the Lithuanian Archive of Literature and Music up to the present day. The hope remains that these materials shall not only be published, but also performed.

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 Mythical Swan: Symbol, Legend, and Image

The swan appears in stories, myths, legends, ballets, poems, and music tone poems and its symbolism seems to be universal. Swan imagery also appears in GIM sessions reported in this article and is seen as a symbol of transition and transformation, a vehicle of travel from one realm to another, a representation of nurturing, and a symbol of beauty. Swan imagery is associated with water, lake, or river and as such represents the depth of the unconscious. These themes are explored in this article as is The Swan of Tuonela, a tone poem featured on the Comforting/Anaclytic program. Helen Bonny’s description of this work is included.

Transfer of media characteristics in Preston Sturges’s screwball comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948) is a complex film with an intricate play on the transfer of media characteristics among dissimilar media. In this article, the source of the theoretical approach is mainly Lars Elleström’s (2014); its presentation in Bruhn and Schirrmacher (2022) is also used as a reference. The case study focuses on the performance of two Overtures of operas and a tone poem for a concert. In the film, they are used both in the representation of the concert, and as film music, the main character being an orchestra conductor who eventually imagines secret revenge dramas and becomes the sound recorder of three fiction films. The four modalities of media interact in Sturges’s film with great variety, during the rehearsal of Rossini’s Overture before the concert, or during the concert as we share the conductor’s mind busy satisfying his secret obsessions, and even, after the concert, when the material and sensorial modalities of sounds appear in the screening of objects. The main point of the transfer of these media characteristics is how they interact in the spectator’s mind; moreover, they either arouse emotions that are shared with the characters, or laughter owing to burlesque effects thus created.

The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets ed. by Nidia Hernández

Reviewed by: The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets ed. by Nidia Hernández Susan Smith Nash The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets Ed. Nidia Hernández Medford, Massachusetts. Arrowsmith Press. 2022. 174 pages. THE INVISIBLE BORDERS OF TIME is a bilingual compilation of poems by five highly regarded female Latin American poets: Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Piedad Bonnett (Colombia), Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Rossella Di Paolo (Peru). Cristina Peri Rossi is known for her erotic poetics that explore not only the physicality of love but also music and blues that blend the idealization of the body with an exploration of perfect love with its attendant longing and loss. “Blanca/White” is an homage to the female body where the language of poetics is used as a construct of the body’s secret pleasures. “Deseo/Desire” weaves together the blues of Tom Waits with the city’s labyrinths and the elusive presence of women once loved and longed for. Piedad Bonnett’s background in philosophy is evident in her phenomenological approach to poetics, where she constructs paradoxical juxtapositions with similes that make the ordinary fresh and new: in “Del Reino de Este Mundo/The Kingdom of This World,” “breasts are firm and sweet like a pair of windows full of light.” Her poems are wryly humorous: in “Miserable Men Make Terrible Dance Partners,” “no woman can be more/lonely, more miserably lonely, than she/who wishes to love a miserable man” (see WLT, Jan. 2022, 15). Yolanda Pantin alternates between dense tone poems of prose and an open minimalism to create a contemplative canvas. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Notes for a Poetics (Version II, against myself).” References to paintings, filmmakers (Tarkovsky), and writers construct a frame for introspective passages flowing from juxtapositions: her sister, secrets, outrageous ambition, the island of Margarita. Oblivion and the indeterminate give Carmen Boullosa’s poetry a haunting quality, even as her metaphors are tactile and immediate. She describes night as a “strange petal that falls like winged rust” in one poem, and then in another, night is a “peaceful skein of sound.” In both “Memoria Vacía/Empty Memory” and “El Hilo Olvida/The Thread Forgets,” the world becomes a mosaic textured with the people, sounds, and landscape of everyday [End Page 63] life, where the narrator sees herself as raging yet mute, communication thwarted as those around her sleep. Rossella Di Paolo’s spare poems contain powerful personification and imagistic lines that evoke emotions of longing and aspiration. In “Las Montañas/The Mountains,” the mountains experience nostalgia, resignation, and have wings that allow future flight. In “Milquinientas/Fifteen Hundred,” the narrator perceives herself as a stone goat in the mountains, always climbing, always dreaming, despite the “thorny sun that scratches my eyes.” The goal of editor Nidia Hernández was to select poems that show the reader how the poets “translate their reality through language.” To read the Spanish original and the English translation is a special treat, as the work shimmers in both and captivates the reader through new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today

Специфіка музичної інтерпретації картин Арнольда Бекліна Максом Регером

The article analyses the interaction of arts on the example of the program work Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin by Max Reger, written under the impression from the paintings by Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss symbolist painter. New perspectives were found in the study of the composer's individual style. The analysis of the composition Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin (1913) gives the possibility to investigate M. Reger's views on works of fine art manifested in the specific features of the music piece as well as the role of visual impression and its place in the construction of musical images. Particular attention is paid to the analysis and use of means of musical expression. Using the cultural method for researching artist biographies, it was possible to determine the exact version of the painting Isle of the Dead by A. Böcklin, which served as a program for M. Reger on the basis of which he wrote the poem of the same name (third). This article reveals the composer's style orientation, which constitutes a synthesis of romantic emotionality with a strong reliance on constructiveness, clearness and intellectuality. The article analyzes directly opposite views on M. Reger's work and identifies the original essence of the composer's art. The study tracks the composer's connections with fine arts. An interdisciplinary approach allowed reconstructing the author's perception of the visual images of the paintings The Hermit, Playing in the Waves, Isle of the Dead and Bacchantenfest. The analysis proves that the composer chose plot motifs based on the criteria of duality, which means that each motive goes hand in hand with its antipode. M. Reger sees it as a life-death formula, which is vividly embodied in the Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin, where parts one and three named the Hermit and Isle of the Dead represent death and the other two – Playing in the Waves and Bacchantenfest – is life in its vigorous manifestation.

Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder

Reviewed by: Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder Pamela S. Saur Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder, eds., Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German. Legenda: Germanic Literatures 21. London: Modern Research Association, 2020. 234 pp. Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German is the twenty-first volume of a series of scholarly books, "Germanic Literatures." Chaired by Ritchie Robertson at the University of Oxford, the Editorial Committee of the series currently includes professors from Oxford, London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Toronto. The mission of the series reads as follows: "Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland." This volume focuses largely on developments from 1950 to 1970 but discusses other years in tracing writers' entire careers. According to the authors of one of the chapters, Thomas Eder and Sven Vitse, the term "neo-avant-garde" distinguishes the era from the classical (Paris from 1860 onwards) and the historical (1900–1920) (130). In this comparative—or "confrontational"—book each chapter pairs a Dutch-language neo-avant-garde writer with a German-language representative of the genre. Segments for each author discussed are devoted to Background, Poetology, Reception, and Literary Practice, with a Conclusion on both. Chapters that pair a Dutch writer (named here first) with one from Germany discuss and compare Mark Insingel and Helmut Heißenbüttel; Armando (the pseudonym of Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd) and Alexander Kluge; and Patrick Conrad and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Austrian writers, whose chapters are given a closer look below, are Gerhard Rühm, paired with Paul de Vree; Friederike Mayröcker, whose Dutch counterpart is Lucienne Stassaert; and Oswald Wiener, paired with Jacq Firmin Vogelaar. The book contains several illustrations, some of which are concrete poems with visual elements such as words and letters arranged as meaningful designs. The introduction presents bibliographies, previews of each of the book's chapters, and insightful statements on aspects of the "neo-avant-garde" and its many aspects and forms. Defining characteristics mentioned include "scepticism toward language, political authority, bourgeois ideology, and toward the authority of traditional literary genres" (1) and exploitation of "the visual and material nature of poetry" (3). Neo-avant-garde and other experimental literature [End Page 134] of the 1960s also reflected emancipatory and anti-establishment social movements of the time. The chapter devoted to Belgian Paul de Vree and Gerhard Rühm demonstrates that neo-avant-garde literature is connected to and can fruitfully be merged with other artistic genres (de Vree was a painter, Rühm a musician and composer). Both of these multimedia writers created "concrete" or "visual" poetry, but neither "ever limited themselves to a mechanical application of those programmatic principles" (13). De Vree's experimental poetry incorporated quotations, words in regional dialects, references to technology and youth culture, and visual material such as photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertisements. Rühm made many associations between language and music, creating acoustic poetry (for listening), non-conceptual phonetic poetry, and "tone poems" with specified qualities such as pitch, volume, duration of sounds, speed, and tone color (harsh, soft, falsetto, etc.) (41). The chapter "Hybrid Hydra-Heads" contains the book's only discussions of female writers, Austrian Friederike Mayröcker and Dutch writer Lucienne Stassaert. Both created experimental work marked by ambiguity and volatility, although their viewpoints diverged. Mayröcker, who rejected trends and group membership, did not embrace Staessart's explicit left ist viewpoint or her bohemian and anti-establishment sentiments. Mayröcker created "hybrid prose poems," highly original theatrical sketches and operatic pieces that reveal the "unnatural, hierarchical and gendered conditions" (109) of opera training and production. She is also known for "didactic" pieces offering largely aesthetic commentary in formats of "text books, conversation lexicons, instructional manuals, etc." (111). According to the chapter's conclusion: "both authors deliberately wanted to break with conventions of narrative writing and promoted a poetics that could not be...

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion.Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

„And that is how my first records appeared under the name of Dr Richard Strauss“

Abstract The paper deals with the first recording of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan, of which the first half (i.e. the first two of a total four sides of this 1916 78-rpm recording) has repeatedly been said to be conducted not by Richard Strauss, but by George Szell who served as Strauss’s assistant at the Berlin court opera at that time. By a close examination of written accounts, I wish to clarify the background of this narrative which Peter Morse, somehow misleadingly, has called an “old story” as early as in 1977, though it seems that it was not given currency prior to the late 1960s when Szell himself mentioned the recording en passant during an interview. In a second step, comparative analyses of certain sections from both this 1916 and Strauss’s later recordings of Don Juan will not only proof Szell’s participation, but aim at determining the respective interpretational concepts in their differing performance choices. Finally, further comparison between Szell’s later Don Juan recordings (1943, 1957, 1969) and selected performances by contemporary conductors intends to help situate Szell within the Austro-German Espressivo tradition, whereby the detailed analysis of tempo-dramaturgical strategies in these recordings will itself contribute to a differentiation of the frequently simplified notion of “Espressivo.”

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson

Reviewed by: Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson Frederick Key Smith Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. By Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. (Music, Nature, Place.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xi, 383 p. ISBN 9780253044044 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780253044051 (paperback), $38; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, works list, bibliography, index. My first exposure to the music of Jón Leifs (1899–1968) occurred early in my graduate studies as an aspiring musicologist. Having been attracted to Norse mythology since childhood and becoming reacquainted with it during my undergraduate years, the interrelationship between myth and music seemed a natural direction for my musicological studies. Coincidentally, it was not one of Leifs’s myth-based works to which I was first exposed, but his monolithic tone poem Hekla, op. 52 (1961) on the disc Earquake: The Loudest Classical Music of All Time (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Leif Segerstam, Ondine OND 824 [1997], CD). Though I initially considered the work a cacophonous oddity, it turned out to be an invaluable discovery. A few years later, during work on my doctoral dissertation on Leifs and related contact with the Icelandic Music Information Center, I had the privilege of engaging in several conversations with the Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson (b. 1973). At that time, Ingólfsson was working on what would become one of the first major biographies of Jón Leifs in Icelandic, Jón Leifs: Líf í tónum ([ Jón Leifs: A Life in Music] Reykjavik: Mál og Menning, 2009), which had been anticipated by music critic Alex Ross (New Yorker, 23 August 2004, 48–53, 55–59) and nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize (Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin) the year it appeared. Ten years later, Ingólfsson brings his notable scholarship on perhaps the most original composer of modern Nordic art music to the English-speaking world in Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. As much a biography of Leifs’s complex life and personality as it is an analysis of the composer’s distinct musical voice and compositional output, Ingólfsson’s highly accessible work also provides historical insight into Iceland’s development from “virtually a ‘land without music’ ” (p. 9) to that of a significant contributor to Nordic musical heritage. Over the course of nine lengthy chapters and a brief epilogue, Ingólfsson paints the portrait of a tortured artist who struggled with both his identity and legacy in a rapidly changing Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. As is emphasized by the author, Leifs desired to be not only Iceland’s foremost composer but also a major influence on his country’s cultural and political development, despite living much of his career as an expatriate in Germany. Ingólfsson’s book describes in detail the many professional roles that Leifs played throughout his life, including that of composer, conductor, amateur ethnomusicologist, advocate for artists’ rights, and radio music director. First and foremost a nationalist, Leifs himself stated, “I stand or fall as an Icelander, I can only be understood as an Icelander, for I have always, as long as I remember, loved Iceland more than anything else in the world, almost more than my art or my family” (p. 34). As a Nordic composer, Leifs essentially parallels his more famous nationalist colleagues Edvard Grieg of Norway, Jean Sibelius of Finland, and Carl Nielsen of Denmark. But unlike each [End Page 67] of these composers, for whom romanticism was a compositional foundation, Leifs was a staunch modernist, though he did not completely disavow tradition. Indeed, as Ingólfsson makes clear on several occasions, Leifs was enamored with Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music he began learning as a teenager and who was “the only composer for whom he expressed unqualified affinity and admiration in his adult years” (p. 109). Aside from his orchestral Variazioni pastorale, op. 8 (1920–30) and a few cases of inspiration, however, Leifs’s music bears no discernable resemblance to that of Beethoven. It was instead the heroic character of Beethoven—specifically his life, music, and aesthetic principles—with...

An Analysis of Haydn Wood’s Mannin Veen as It Relates to Manx Folk Songs and Legends From the Isle of Man

Haydn Wood (1882–1959) was an English composer raised on the Isle of Man. His compositional strengths lay in melodic writing and scoring, and he is best remembered as a composer of British light music. Haydn Wood has also been credited with composing works for wind band, most notably, Mannin Veen: A Manx Tone Poem. Given the lack of research on Haydn Wood, his compositions and his homeland, this article focuses on the transcribed wind work Mannin Veen as it relates to Manx folksongs and legends from the Isle of Man. In this article, comprehensive research on Haydn Wood, The Isle of Man, and Mannin Veen is provided. For the analysis, original source materials are provided that can be used by conductors to better prepare and perform these works.

Musical idioms in Șerban Marcu’s Toccatas

Abstract The present research focuses on the toccata in a contemporary stylistic context, as a revival of the Baroque toccata in the creation of a Romanian composer from Cluj-Napoca, Șerban Marcu. He is a representative of the mature school of composition, studying under the tutorship of the celebrated Romanian composer Cornel Țăranu. His style unveils a series of constant traits, such as the programmatic feature and the preference towards musical forms and genres pertaining to the Western musical tradition, among them the madrigal, the song, the bagatella, the variations, the suite, the étude, the tone poem, the ballet or even the opera. He wrote five toccatas over the span of a decade. The toccata – understood both as a musical genre and a composing technique – is to be found in his output either as a movement in a mini-suite (Free Preview, 2008), or as an autonomous work, written for solo instruments as the piano (Toccatina, 2017), the organ (Balkan Toccata, 2018), as well as for various chamber ensembles, each featuring, among other instruments, the piano (tocCaTa brevissima, 2014, Toccata impaziente, 2018). The analysis unfolds by taking as focal point a series of keywords that have circumscribed the term toccata within the musicological literature. These core concepts are further placed in relationship with various techniques – neo-baroque as well as modern ones – which are to be identified in Șerban Marcu’s output of toccatas. The analytical procedures focus on highlighting the tradition/innovation binomial and are layered by taking into discussion the parameters of the musical discourse, namely the form, the musical language, the idiomatic instrumental writing, the compositional techniques, as well as aesthetic aspects such as the playfulness, the comic, the irony, the bizarre, the caricature and the paraphrase.

William Wallace (1860-1940): British ophthalmologist and classical music composer.

William Wallace (1860-1940) received the degrees MB, MCh, and MD from the University of Glasgow, and qualified as an ophthalmologist in 1888. Even as he was training in eye surgery, he was already composing music, and Wallace became more attracted to the ear than to the eye and abandoned medicine to become a classical music composer. He never practiced ophthalmology after 1889, except during First World War when he volunteered to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was mostly self-taught. Wallace was influenced by the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and thus became a champion for late Romantic music. He wrote many types of music: his most successful were symphonic or tone poems. He was a playwright, music critic, translator, artist, and advocate for composers' copyright interests in Parliament. After the War, he never again composed but held important positions in organized music such as Professor of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Only about 30% of his compositions were performed or published in his lifetime, but recently, there has been increased interest in performing and recording his music.

A Hero’s Life and Nietzschean Struggle in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben

Nietzsche influenced Strauss throughout the composer’s mature career, from Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (1896), which shares the same name as the treatise by Nietzsche, to Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64 (1911–15), which initially bore the title Der Antichrist, after Nietzsche’s 1888 essay. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, stresses the idea of the Übermensch, which proposes that the human occupies the stratum between the primal and the super-human. The Übermensch is not, however, the zenith for a man. The goal for man is rather his journey toward self-overcoming, his struggle within himself. In Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1898), Strauss incorporates Nietzschean concepts without any direct references to Nietzsche. The designation of a man as a hero, the battle as an obstacle with which one struggles, the alternation between peace and war and the cycle of recurrence in this tone poem all reflect Nietzsche’s ideas. This research considers the tone poem from a hermeneutical perspective and argues that Strauss’s hero in Ein Heldenleben embodies qualities encompassing the true Nietzschean hero.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MOUNTAIN IN THE EUROPEAN AND ROMANIAN SYMPHONIC CREATION

Background: This analytical approach aims to accentuate the interconnections between two universes which are apparently in contradiction: ideal and pragmatic, or symbol and sound.
 The mountain – viewed as a place of creative inspiration – represents a leitmotif of creation in most of the artistic fields. Thus, literature, visual arts and music give this symbol a historical anchor in the artistic movements of all eras
 Methods: In order to exemplify a possible way of interference between the two philosophical areas, we have chosen as a “contact unit” the symbol of the mountain, observing the intuition with which it was represented in Alpen Symphony by Richard Strauss and the tone poem The Mountain by Csíky Boldizsár.
 In the compositional context of the twentieth century, Richard Strauss made a remarkable creation with a strong philosophical idea as a model of descriptive Programmatism.
 In his work, the composer suggests the ascension of a traveler in a mountain climb that encounters, in his journey, places either protected by nature or dangerous The whole journey is dominated by majestic symbols of life, nature, and, and resembles an initiatic journey through which the hero is challenged to push himself to the limits and evolve. Equally, this is an allegory of life.
 On the summit, The Glacier, or The Storm are just some symphonic scenes with complex symbolic connotations that will be analyzed in this research through the connection with the componistic technique of the creator.
 In a mysterious universe, the tone poem The Mountain by Csíky Boldizsár depicts the monumental landscape of the Transylvanian lands, the symbols of greatness, boundlessness and eternity. The intention of the composer is to raise a monument dedicated to the invincible human will, a force that drives explorers of unknown seas and lands, researchers of all mysteries, poets, psychologists, artists, to the eternal unknown.
 In music, the composer uses an abstract language, anchored in modernity, using a whole arsenal of complex mixtures of chords, bartokian modes, non-imitative polyphony, mobile clusters, elements that serve the expression.
 Results, Conclusions: Finally, this research aims to demonstrate, as a synthesis, how the tonal and modal languages manage to illustrate the connotations extracted from the symbol of the mountain.

Die Orchesterwerke Isaac Albéniz' nach dem Manuskript 984 der „Biblioteca de Catalunya": Versuch einer einschätzung

Der Aufsatz befaßt sich vor allem mit der orchestralen Musik Isaac Albéniz' (1860-1909) nach dem aus dem Nachlaß der Familie des Komponisten stammenden Manuskript 984 de „Biblioteca de Catalunya" in Barcelona, die zu Gunsten seiner Kompositionen für Klavier oft teilweise verschmäht wurde. Der Komponist aus Camprodon erscheint hier im Kontext des katalanischen Modernismus der Jahrhundertwende, welcher wenig spater mit den spanischen Erstaufführungen der Opern Wagners zumindest teilweise unter den Einfluß der ersten Wellen des Wagnerismus geriet. Das Manuskript 984 zeigt deutlich den unversöhnlichen Widerspruch, mit dem sich der Forscher bei dem Unterfangen einer wertenden Einordnung der Orchestermusik Albéniz' konfrontiert sieht: Neben vollständig auskomponierten Werken wie der symphonischen Dichtung Catalonia (1908), deren nuancenreiche Instrumentierung an die franzosische Schule Paul Dukas' erinnert, finden sich zahlreiche Entwürfe von häufig äußerst nachlässiger instrumentaler Technik, welche der Feder eines anderen Komponisten zu entstammen scheinen. Werke wie die oben gennante Catalonia legen für die Kompositionen, deren Orchesterpalette reichhaltige Schattierungen aufweist, die Notwendigkeit nahe, die wahrscheinliche Intervention eines anderen Komponisten bei ihrer Instrumentierung in die Erwägungen mit einzubeziehen.

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Flip Book

Flip Book Jeffrey Cyphers Wright (bio) Cubist States of Mind / Not the Cruelest Month Marc Jampole The Poet's Haven www.poetshaven.com 36 Pages; Print, $6.00 Reading Marc Jampole's verse reminds me of an old adage I just made up: Words are the matter of poetry—music is the mortar. Jampole combines words and music seamlessly, creating potent tone poems. "A wind full of ocean" becomes the subject of a mellifluous bouquet. "Undivided Stillness" echoes with insights on isolation and integration. Indeed, the questioning of space between the singular and the universal is central throughout as the very atmosphere itself is plumbed for its recesses and riddles. Hence: zen jazzmine wizardry. In his first book, Music from Words (2007), Jampole introduces an innovative brand of linguistic liquidity. We often find bunched rhymes and alliterative bursts. Here is an extreme example. A muggy ocean breeze…fills the streets with sticky nuzzlesand the puzzle of the clouds:will it drizzle, will it drench… Another stylistic flourish involves surprising syntactical juxtapositions like "above us tendriled contrail welkin…." These techniques work together to both support and deflate the existentially elegiac undertow. They also offset the literary danger of overly relying on one or the other. Finding music in the words is evident in the playful poem "July 4th." In this dialogue with a three year old, Joe Venuti becomes the nom du jour. Everything is a "Joe Venuti." And the three year old at the picnicsaid she wanted to play the violinand I said just like Joe Venutiand she said, You're Joe Venutian she pulled a tuft of grass and said,here's some Joe Venuti. Another sort of list poem, "Faith Is a Fine Invention," begins with an epigram by Emily Dickinson. Jampole often speaks through varying masks, from Victor Hugo to Moses to Gilgamesh, exploring legends and archetypes to find beauty and meaning, as here: "formal eternal / mouth moves and makes no sound, then sound of soundlessness." In several poems, a melancholy examination of unfulfilled fates is effectively evoked in a slate-gray palette. For instance, the protagonist of "Thomas Alfred Thinks of His Princesses" is a lonely conformist caught in a shiny grind. The presence of a paralyzed J. Alfred Prufrock (T. S. Eliot) obviously hangs over the poem. "29 Birds (after Audubon)" reads like an ekphrastic erasure work from a guide book (with a sly cross reference to Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"). Jampole has a wonderful ear for placing words in a way that animates them and gives them interactive agency, such as "… screeches floating feathers settling cliffward. / Falcon." By way of conflating these two poems, let me quote the venerable Helen Vendler. "The blackbird has perhaps something in common with Eliot's 'shadow' that falls between potency and act, desire and consummation." Jampole exploits that gap as well—that negative space between positive connectors. In his new double book Not the Cruelest Month/Cubist States of Mind, he has sharpened his skills. The poems in Not the Cruelest Month (with its continued association with Eliot) are, in part, a Romantic overture to April. Nature mingles with the city and its inhabitants in immersive sketches. The wind "gently licks the high rise dwellings." It is "uncorrupted by the fumes / of buses, taxis, cars, and trucks." This diacritical stance, of opposing forces interacting, adds underlying suspense. The dual role of mother nature, its sexuality and its reproductivity, is looked at in "The Legs of Nature:" Between the legs of nature,she's mothering but not a mother,more a fickle courtesanto bend at waistand let her whisper reassuring liesabout forever after possibilities. Continuing to confront dualities, the courtesan in the poem is also an oppositional type compared to the poet. She is not one to "pretend to feel / the dissonance between a life and a language." Yet this carnalized heroine "makes the lie behind the promise of each moment / more attractive than the moment." Finding unity in antithetical propositions is perfectly expressed in the title "Storm Music." Both eight-line stanzas begin with description and end with a...

Bohemian Rhapsodist: Antonín Dvořák's Píseň bohatýrská and the Historiography of Czech Music

Standard histories of Antonín Dvořák's life have largely ignored his output in the field of the symphonic poem, especially his final work in the genre, Píseň bohatýrská (Heroic Song). Composed in 1897 after four other tone poems explicitly based on poems by the Czech writer and ethnographer Karel Jaromír Erben, this piece features a much more abstract program and depicts the life, travails, and ultimate victory of a Slavonic bardic hero, assumed by many to be the composer himself. It premiered in late 1898 and early 1899 in Vienna and Prague, respectively, inviting mostly favorable reviews and performances in many other European cities before sliding into obscurity after the turn of the twentieth century. I situate Píseň bohatýrská in both the context of Dvořák's larger output and the critical discourses of the late nineteenth century, using it as a focal point to examine not only Dvořák's mythologized image as a composer at the fin de siècle, but the history of the symphonic poem, the politics of the Vienna-Prague critical axis, and the hardening of critical orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Through an in-depth study of Píseň bohatýrská's reception, I reveal a picture of Dvořák at once familiar and unfamiliar: as the naive, spontaneously creative absolute musician at odds, in the eyes of the critics, with the unfamiliar territory of the symphonic poem, and as a specifically Czech musician who was nevertheless placed in the same masculinized, Germanocentric composer-hero lineage of genius as Beethoven and Liszt. Nevertheless, the understanding of Dvořák as absolute Czech musician par excellence ultimately triumphed, weathering the assaults of his program music to survive into the present. This article provides a new understanding of the complexity of Dvořák's image near the end of his life, inviting a reconsideration of the composer.