Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: oxford music online, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 26 - 49 of 49
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: oxford music online in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Meet the woman behind Grove Music Online, Anna-Lise Santella. We snagged a bit of Anna-Lise’s time to sit down with her and find out more about her own musical passions and research.
Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?
My main instrument is violin, which I’ve played since I was eight. I play both classical and Irish fiddle and am currently trying to learn bluegrass. In a previous life I played a lot of pit band for musical theater. I’ve also worked as a singer and choral conductor. These days, though, you’re more likely to find a mandolin or guitar in my hands.
Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?
My research interests are pretty broad, which is why I enjoy working in reference so much. Currently I’m working on a history of women’s symphony orchestras in the United States between 1871 and 1945. They were a key route for women seeking admission into formerly all-male orchestras like the Chicago Symphony. After that, I’m hoping to work on a history of the Three Arts Clubs, a network of residential clubs that housed women artists in cities in the US and abroad. The clubs allowed female performers to safely tour or study away from their families by giving them secure places to live while on the road, places to rehearse and practice, and a community of like-minded people to support them. In general, I’m interested in the ways public institutions have affected and responded to women as performers.
What artist do you have on repeat at the moment?
I tend to have my listening on shuffle. I like not being sure what’s coming next. That said, I’ve been listening to Tune-Yards’ (a.k.a. Merill Garbus) latest album an awful lot lately. Neko Case with the New Pornographers and guitarist/songwriter/storyteller extraordinaire Jim White are also in regular rotation.
What was the last concert/gig you went to?
I’m lucky to live not far from the bandshell in Prospect Park and I try to catch as many of the summer concerts there as I can. The last one I attended was Neutral Milk Hotel, although I didn’t stay for the whole thing. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Nickel Creek concert. I love watching Chris Thile play, although he makes me feel totally inadequate as a mandolinist.
How do you listen to most of the music you listen to? On your phone/mp3 player/computer/radio/car radio/CDs?
Mostly on headphones. I’m constantly plugged in, which makes me not a very good citizen, I think. I’m trying to get better about spending some time just listening to the city. But there’s something about the delivery system of headphones to ears that I like – music transmitted straight to your head makes you feel like your life has a soundtrack. I especially like listening on the subway. I’ll often be playing pieces I’m trying to learn on violin or guitar and trying to work out fingerings, which I’m pretty sure makes me look like an insane person. Fortunately insane people are a dime a dozen on the subway.
Do you find that listening to music helps you concentrate while you work, or do you prefer silence?
I like listening while I work, but it has to be music I find fairly innocuous, or I’ll start thinking about it and analyzing it and get distracted from what I’m trying to do. Something beat driven with no vocals is best. My usual office soundtrack is a Pandora station of EDM.
Has there been any recent music research or scholarship on a topic that has caught your eye or that you’ve found particularly innovative?
In general I’m attracted to interdisciplinary work, as I like what happens when ideologies from one field get applied to subject matter of another – it tends make you reevaluate your methods, to shake you out of the routine of your thinking. Right now I’ve become really interested in the way in which we categorize music vs. noise and am reading everything I can on the subject from all kinds of perspectives – music cognition, acoustics, cultural theory. It’s where neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy and musicology all come together, which, come to think of it, sounds like a pretty dangerous intersection. Currently I’m in the middle of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012) edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. At the same time, I’m rereading Jacques Attali’s landmark work Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977). We have a small music/neuroscience book group made up of several editors who work in music and psychology who have an interest in this area. We’ll be discussing the Attali next month.
Who are a few of your favorite music critics/writers?
There are so many – I’m a bit of a criticism junkie. I work a lot with period music journalism in my own research and I love reading music criticism from the early 20th century. It’s so beautifully candid — at times sexy, cruel, completely inappropriate — in a way that’s rare in contemporary criticism. A lot of the reviews were unsigned or pseudonymous, so I’m not sure I have a favorite I can name. There’s a great book by Mark N. Grant on the history of American music criticism called Maestros of the Pen that I highly recommend as an introduction. For rock criticism, Ellen Willis’columns from the Village Voice are still the benchmark for me, I think. Of people writing currently, I like Mark Gresham (classical) and Sasha Frere-Jones (pop). And I like to argue with Alex Ross and John von Rhein.
I also like reading more literary approaches to musical writing. Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful is a poetic, semi-fictional look at jazz, with a mix of stories about legendary musicians like Duke Ellington and Lester Young interspersed with an analytical look at jazz. And some of my favorite writing about music is found in fiction. Three of my favorite novels use music to tell the story. Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing uses Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial as the focal point of a story that alternates between a musical mixed-race family and the story of the Civil Rights movement itself. In The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem writes beautifully about music of the 1970s that mediates between nearly journalistic detail of Brooklyn in the 1970s and magical realism. And Kathryn Davies’ The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf contains some of the best description of compositional process that I’ve come across in fiction. It’s a challenge to evoke sound in prose – it’s an act of translation – and I admire those who can do it well.
Grove Music Online presents this multi-part series by Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the life of Jewish musician Salamone Rossi on the anniversary of his birth in 1570. Professor Harrán considers three major questions: Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews; Rossi as a Jew among Christians; and the conclusions to be drawn from both.
Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews
What do we know of Salamone Rossi’s family? His father was named Bonaiuto Azaria de’ Rossi (d. 1578): he composed Me’or einayim (Light of the Eyes). Rossi had a brother, Emanuele (Menaḥem), and a sister, Europe, who, like him, was a musician. She is known to have performed as a singer in the play Il ratto di Europa (“The Rape of Europa”) in 1608. The court chronicler Federico Follino raved over her performance, describing it as that of “a woman understanding music to perfection” and “singing, to the listeners’ great delight and their greater wonder, in a most delicate and sweet-sounding voice.”
Salamone Rossi appears to have used his connections at court to improve his family’s situation, as in 1602 when Rossi wrote to Duke Vincenzo on behalf of his brother Emanuele:
Letter that Salamone Rossi wrote on behalf of his brother Emanuele (21 February 1606); fair copy, with the close and signature in Rossi’s own hand. Archivio Storico, Archivio Storico, Mantua.
The duke granted the request in order to “to show Salamone Rossi ebreo some sign of gratitude for services that he, with utmost diligence, rendered and continues to render over many years. We have resolved to confer the duties of collecting the fees on the person of Emanuele, Salamone’s brother, in whose faith and diligence we place our confidence.”
Until now, it has been thought that Rossi earned his livelihood from his salary at the Mantuan court, and since the salary was—by comparison with that of other musicians at the court—very small, Rossi tried to supplement it by earning money on the side by investments. From 1622 on he was earning 1,200 lire, a large sum of money for a musician whose annual wages at the court were only 156 lire. Rossi needed the money to cover the cost of his publications and to support his family.
Rossi’s situation within the community can only be conjectured. By “community,” we are talking about some 2,325 Jews living in the city of Mantua out of a total population of 50,000. True, Rossi was its most distinguished “musician” and his service for the court would have brought honor on the Jewish community. But because of his non-Jewish connections, he enjoyed privileges denied his coreligionists. In 1606, for example, he was exempted from wearing a badge. The badge was shameful to Jews who, in their activities, were in close touch with Christians, as were Rossi and other Jews who performed before them as musicians or actors or who engaged in loan banking.
As other “privileged” Jews, Rossi occupied a difficult situation: his Christian employers considered him a Jew, yet the Jews probably considered him an outsider. He could choose from two alternatives: convert to Christianity to improve his situation with the Christians; or solidify his position within the Jewish community, which he probably did whenever he could by representing its interests before the authorities and by providing compositions for Jewish weddings, circumcisions, the inauguration of Torah scrolls, and for Purim festivities. All this is speculative, for we know nothing about these activities. We are better informed about Rossi’s role in the Jewish theater, whose actors were required to prepare each year one or two plays with musical intermedi. Since the Jews were expected to act, sing, and play instruments, their leading musician Salamone Rossi probably contributed to the theater by writing vocal and instrumental works, rehearsing them and, together with others, playing or even singing them.
Salamone Rossi, Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh (“Songs by Solomon”), 1623, no. 8. See Salamone Rossi, Complete Works, ed. Don Harrán (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 100), vols. 1–12 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag for the American Institute of Musicology), vols. 13a and 13b (Madison WI: American Institute of Musicology, 1995), 13b: 24–26.
It was in his Hebrew collection, however, that Rossi demonstrated his connections with his people. His intentions were good: after having published collections of Italian vocal music and instrumental works, Rossi decided, around 1612, to write Hebrew songs. He describes these songs as “new songs [zemirot] that I devised through ‘counterpoint’ [seder].” True, attempts were made to introduce art music into the synagogue in the early seventeenth century. But none of these early works survive. Rossi’s thirty-three “Songs by Solomon” (Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh) are the first Hebrew polyphonic “songs” to be printed. Here is an example from the opening of the collection, “Elohim, hashivenu”.
Good intentions are one thing; the status of art music in the synagogue is another. The prayer services made no accommodation for art music. Rossi’s aim, to quote him, was to write works “for thanking God and singing [le-zammer] to His exalted name on all sacred occasions” to be performed in prayer services, particularly on Sabbaths and festivals.
Headline image credit: Opening of Salomone de Rossi’s Madrigaletti, Venice, 1628. Photo of Exhibit at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
American composer and self-proclaimed “bad boy of music” George Antheil was born today 114 years ago in Trenton, New Jersey. His most well-known piece is Ballet mècanique, which was premiered in Paris in 1926; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, from which Antheil seems to have derived quite a bit of inspiration, the premiere resulted in audience outrage and a riot in the streets. The piece is scored for pianos and a number of percussion instruments, including airplane propellers.
Though he died at the age of 58, polymath Antheil managed to accomplish quite a bit in his relatively short life both in and outside the field of music. Here are some highlights:
His name appears alongside the actress Hedy Lamarr’s on a patent, granted in 1942, for an early type of frequency hopping device, their invention for disrupting the intended course of radio-controlled German torpedoes.
His music was championed by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.
Under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, he wrote Death in the Dark, a detective novel edited by T.S. Eliot, the hero of which is based on Pound.
After spending the majority of the 1920s and 30s in Europe, he settled in Hollywood and wrote dozens of film, television and radio scores, for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang (and with such titillating titles as “Zombies of Mora Tau” and “Panther Girl of the Kongo”).
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Since joining the Grove Music editorial team, Meghann Wilhoite has been a consistent contributor to the OUPblog. Over the years she has shared her knowledge and insights on topics ranging from football and opera to Monteverdi and Bob Dylan, so we thought it was about time to get to know her a bit better.
Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?
In order of capability, I play the pipe organ, piano, synths, and guitar. I also sing a bit, but I gave up on my dream of being an opera singer long ago!
Organ Console, Holy Trinity, Buffalo, NY. Photo by Jarle Fagerheim. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?
As an organist, I mostly play Baroque music (I <3 Bach 5eva), though I recently commissioned an excellent piece from contemporary composer Matthew Hough, which we’ll get to recording as soon as we have the funding. As a pianist, I play lots of different stuff from Classical era onwards. As a synth player and guitarist I play indie rock, mostly stuff I’ve written or stuff I’ve collaborated on.
What artist do you have on repeat at the moment?
My current lifestyle sort of dictates what I listen to right now: I’m either on the subway or blocking out ambient sounds in the office (nothin’ but love for my fellow cube dwellers), which means it’s difficult to listen to stuff where there’s an extreme difference between the loudest and the softest sound. Thus, artists like Interpol, Cocteau Twins (Elizabeth Fraser swoon), and Grimes dominate my playlist; if I had more time in quieter spaces I would also be listening to more avant-garde stuff as well.
What was the last concert/gig you went to?
The last concert I went to was part of the series I help run called Music at First; we were presenting the music of Jerome Kitzke, and it was pretty wild.
How do you listen to most of the music you listen to? On your phone/mp3 player/computer/radio/car radio/CDs?
Phone on the subways, computer (Pandora or Spotify) at work.
Do you find that listening to music helps you concentrate while you work, or do you prefer silence?
Music definitely helps me concentrate while I work, with the exception of creative writing.
Has there been any recent music research or scholarship on a topic that has caught your eye or that you’ve found particularly innovative?
Actually, my most recent scholarship binge has been on historiography, specifically the white-washing of European history (there’s a great Tumblr called MedievalPOC that focuses on the white-washing of European art). I would love to do more research on people of color with regards to the Western music canon (you know, those same hundred or so pieces by the same twenty or so composers that every music history textbook teaches you about).
Who are a few of your favorite music critics / writers?
Anastasia Tsioulcas (NPR, et al.) and Steve Smith (Boston Globe) are two critics/writers whose work I admire. They give an honest take on the music they’re reviewing without getting polemical, and they both promote gender parity within the field.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Ever wondered what goes into scoring film music? Is the music written during filming? Or is it all added after the film is finished? Regular OUPblog contributor Scott Huntington recently spoke with film composer Joe Kraemer about his compositional process, providing an inside look at what it’s like to score music for an independent film.
Scott Huntington: What’s your process of creation like?
Joe Kraemer: Ideally, I see the movie without any temp score, but these days, that is rare. [Director] Chris McQuarrie doesn’t like temp scores, so the two films I’ve done with him (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) we skipped the temp process and I was able to work with a clean slate, so to speak.
I look at a scene, and based either on the cutting, the dialogue, or the rhythm of the scene, I find the spot where I believe music should come in. Then I roll on down until I think music should go out. I don’t use any hard and fast rules. A lot of it is based on feel.
Once I’ve decided where the music will start, I try and find the right tempo for the music, fast or slow. Next I consider the color of the music, light or dark, major or minor, brassy or strings, and so on. I continue on this path of binary decision-making until I reach a solution. If that solution doesn’t work, I work my way back and try something else, such as a faster tempo, a different color or a different instrumentation. Sometimes, I make decisions that don’t really have a logical explanation, but they just feel right. I like to refer to the scene in “Star Wars” where Ben Kenobi is cut down by Darth Vader, and John Williams scores the sequence with a sweeping version of Princess Leia’s Theme, because that theme has great sweep and scope, and Ben’s theme was more somber. His decision seems nonsensical from a logical point of view, but it’s right-on from an emotional point of view.
Scott Huntington: Have you seen changes in technology impact the way you score movies?
Joe Kraemer: Well, the AVID editing system has opened up the audio side of things for film editors completely. As a result, films are built with really well-edited temp scores right from the get-go. In the old days, a Moviola or a flat-bed had one or two tracks of sound, so the temp score was something that was laid in very bluntly, just to create a feeling or atmosphere, without it needing to be a definitive presentation. Now, the ability to edit the temp score to match the picture in minute detail has resulted in everyone accepting it as the baseline standard for the film. The editor cuts the scene to the temp, the director looks at the cut with the temp, right away the temp is now the point of comparison for the rest of the process. Even if the composer never sees the temp, he or she is competing with it. The composer’s music is evaluated as much for whether it matches the temp as whether it works for the scene in the first place.
What you end up with is the picture-editor making a lot of the decisions about the music before the composer even has a shot at bringing something of himself (or herself) to the table. That isn’t inherently bad, picture editors usually have great taste in music, but as a composer it can feel restrictive. Also, you end up with a lot of films sounding the same, because all the editors fall in love with the same piece of music at the same time. Case in point, for about 10 years after “American Beauty” came out, all I heard in temp scores was Tom Newman’s score for that movie. There are only so many ways one can reinvent piano chords over sustained string beds.
As far as the composing work itself, for me the computer-based paradigm has been a life-saver. From adjusting tempos to catch cuts, to mixing electronic sounds with acoustic sounds, computer-based composing has made it possible for me to make a living as a composer, even when films have had skimpy music budgets, because I can do all of the work myself. I don’t use an assistant; I don’t have a team of ghost-writers. I put all my time and effort into making the score as good as possible myself, within the means at my disposal. Technology makes that possible.
Scott Huntington: Describe the process of writing the music for Favor.
Joe Kraemer: The process starts as soon as the movie is over the first time I see it. I immediately begin thinking about different aspects of the score: what will the instrumentation be? What will the mood be? The tone?
Next comes a period of living with the film. If possible, I get a copy and watch it on repeat for a day or two in my studio while I update my software and do busy work, etc. Once I’ve seen the film a dozen times or so, it’s time to start composing in earnest.
At some point between seeing Favor the first time and getting my own copy to work from, I was swimming in the pool and doodling melodies in my head and I came up with a nice little tune I though would sound pretty on the cello. I made a mental note of it and filed it away in my noggin for some later use.
Some time later, as I sat down to begin writing the cues for Favor, I remembered that melody and found that on a piano, it had a cold sound that contrasted nicely with the beauty of the tune. This seemed to be appropriate for my needs, as I was writing a theme for a character that, rarely seen, hangs over the film like a specter. This contrast of cold and beauty felt right.
Next, I decided I needed some kind of musical “sound effect” to help with certain story elements I wanted the score to reinforce. This was the impetus behind what [director] Paul [Osborne] and I began to call the “Abby Stab”. It’s a sound of a hammer hitting an anvil that has been tweaked with a bunch of plugins. I used it whenever I wanted to audience to think of Abby, to be reminded of her fate, to keep her present in a scene even when she wasn’t there.
After that, it was mostly a task of assembling the music to match what Paul laid out in his temp score. Paul cuts his own films and I know from working with him the past that he is very particular about the way his temp interacts with the editing of the film, so I worked very hard to stay faithful to the way he would crescendo to a cut. That being said, there were major sequences where Paul had no temp score, but I added music because I thought it was an effective spot.
Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Read his previous blog posts and follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Music today is usually categorized by the genre to which it most stylistically relates. A quick scroll through the iTunes genres sections reveals the familiar categories, among them Rock, Pop, R&B/Soul, Country, Classical, and Alternative. Songs or musical compilations today seem to have a readily apparent identity.
For the Inuit people of Alaska, this is not the case. Inuit music is distinguished according to its function rather than style, and most songs serve either a secular, social, or religious purpose. Many religious songs tend to be reserved for traditional ceremonies, while secular songs might be focused on the individual. Secular songs are sung to ease the birth of a child, to locate lost objects, or to cure illnesses.
There are, of course, many sub-categories of songs. For example, the Inuit of St. Lawrence Island, have terms that distinguish between nighttime and daytime singing, while the Inuit of the Northwest region of Alaska categorize songs by whether they are used in games, in stories, for dance, or in traditional ceremonies.
One such traditional ceremony that is still important for Alaskan Inuit culture is the whaling ceremony. All of the stages in the whaling process are celebrated, and there are songs to reinforce the hunting materials, bring forth the whales, and control the weather. Once the captain and crew return with the captured whales, the materials of the animal are distributed at a celebration called Nalukataq, which takes place during the month of June. Nalukataq, literally meaning “to throw and toss up,” refers to the whaler’s skin toss dance, and celebrates the bounty and distribution of Quaq (whale meat) and Muktuk (whale blubber).
Nalukataq Blanket Toss Barrow, 2006 by By Floyd Davidson. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
To celebrate Nalukataq, communities gather to sing songs, dance, and take part in the traditional whale-toss, in which men and women in the community hold a Nalukataq blanket, generally made from seal or walrus skin, and toss the captains and captains’ wives up into the air. Traditionally, the wives of captains would throw out tools and food whilst being thrown into the air to mimic the distribution of whale meat among members of the community, but the tradition has since evolved to be candy thrown out to children.
As can been seen from Nalukataq, aspects of the original ceremony live on, but traditions have changed with the times. Festivals are often associated with US holidays, such as Independence Day, or with special community events. Although music might not still be used as frequently to help cure illnesses or ease childbirth, it still plays an important role in Alaskan Inuit culture, and will certainly continue to do so.
Sarah Hansen is a Publicity Assistant at Oxford University Press.
Oxford Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its entry on Inuit Music. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Perhaps Ernest Hemingway knew best when he claimed that Josephine Baker was the “most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.” Indeed, Josephine Baker was sensational–as an African American coming of age in the 1920s, she took Paris by storm in La Revue Nègre and relished a career in entertainment that spanned fifty years. On what would be her 108th birthday, Baker’s fans on both sides of the Atlantic still celebrate her legendary charisma.
Born in St. Louis as Freda Josephine McDonald, Josephine’s early years were marked by financial struggles and racial conflict. She managed to escape what promised to be an otherwise dismal future with her innate ability to charm others through singing and dancing. Having taken the surname of her second husband (she had already been married once before at the age of thirteen), Josephine Baker left for New York City. She started out as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along, a vaudeville revue by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and subsequently starred in Blake’s Chocolate Dandies. Later, she performed at New York’s renowned Plantation Club where she was “discovered” by producer Caroline Dudley and asked to be in La Revue Nègre. As part of Dudley’s assemblage of performers, Baker traveled to Paris in 1925, where she received rave reviews for her opening night performance at Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Shortly thereafter, she appeared on stage at the Folies-Bergère wearing only a “skirt” of bananas, a costume for which she became famous and one which left an indelible impression on the audience. After this, she often danced scantily clad, exuding a kind of exoticism that captivated her Parisian public.
Successful live performances led to her foray into film, beginning in 1927 with La Sirène des Tropiques. By 1930, she had dabbled in a career as a singer, having recorded for both Odeon and Columbia Records. Her Columbia recordings included songs such as “J’ai deux amours,” which she would perform at the Casino de Paris, one of the city’s great music halls. The Casino’s impresario, Henri Varna, not only showcased Baker’s talents, but he insisted that she act with the pizzazz and mystique of a superstar. To enhance her image, Baker was given a pet leopard named Chiquita, adorned with a diamond studded collar. The pair delighted (and occasionally shocked) the French public.
In the mid-1930s, she starred in two films, including Zouzou (1934), Princess Tam Tam (1935), neither of which was made readily available to the American public for another fifty-plus years. She also appeared in Moulin Rouge (1939), Fausse Alerte (1945), An Jedem Finger Zehn (1954), and Carosello Del Varietà (1955), but, as she also realized when doing studio recordings, she was only truly in her element on the stage.
After completing Princess Tam Tam, she returned to New York to appear in the Ziegfeld Follies, which featured choreography by George Balanchine, music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and notable performers including Bob Hope. In spite of the Follies’ display of talent, its appearance in New York was subjected to intensely vitriolic reviews. Some of the reviews attacked Baker specifically, by mapping current racial stereotypes and crippling expectations onto her and her performance–expectations which had not affected her career in France in such an irrevocably stark manner.
Although Baker was hurt by the Follies’ flop and the discrimination she faced in her home country, she chose to remain in the United States for the time being. In 1936, she announced her plans to open a night club on East 54th Street called Chez Josephine Baker. Within a year America’s racist climes became too much to bear and Baker returned to France, but France was no longer the utopian escape it once had been. Initial tensions with Germany and the subsequent German occupation ultimately made it very difficult for African-American entertainers to earn a living in France, despite the fact that they had been thriving just a decade earlier.
Portrait of Josephine Baker by Carl Van Vechten, 1951. Public domain via Library of Congress.
Baker, who had married a French Jew, Jean Lion, in 1937, soon became involved in the Resistance, eventually working out of Casablanca as an air auxiliary lieutenant. She received the Croix de Guerre in recognition for her services in the Resistance. Those services included carrying classified information, written in invisible ink on her sheet music, to Portugal for transmission to England.
During World War II, she performed for American and British troops and war workers. These appearances put to rest all rumors circulating in the press that she had died, rumors prompted by the fact that she suffered a series of illnesses in the 1940s.
She reemerged in the 1950s as a staunch supporter and champion of human and civil rights. In 1951, she cancelled an appearance at the NAACP meeting in Atlanta because she, as an African American, was refused lodging. In 1959, returned to the stage to raise funds for the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme–LICRA).
Her most demonstrative gesture was to come. Beginning in 1953, Baker adopted the first of twelve children representing different races and ethnicities. She called her brood the “Rainbow Tribe,” and they are featured in Matthew Pratt Guterl’s book Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard University Press, 2014). They lived in a fifteenth-century castle, “Les Milandes,” which Baker purchased in 1947 but relinquished under extreme financial duress in 1968. Fortunately, her friend and supporter, Princess Grace, offered Baker and her tribe a home in Monaco.
As she aged, Baker found it increasingly challenging to maintain her career on the stage, but she persevered. In fact, on 8 April 1975, she gave a triumphant performance at the Bobino Theatre in Paris, which seemed to foreshadow prosperous days to come. That was not to be.
Four days later, on 12 April 1975, Baker went to sleep and never woke up. Thousands of adoring fans paid their respects, and nearly 2,000 mourners, led by Princess Grace, attended funeral services in Monaco, where Baker was buried.
A woman as sensational as Josephine Baker indubitably lives on–a number of books and articles have been written about Baker’s life, including five autobiographies. Her life and career have also served as inspiration for biographies, novels, films, plays, a musical, a restaurant, and even a tribute featuring a woodwind quintet. In 2007, the Grammy Award-winning woodwind quintet “Imani Winds” released Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot! in celebration of Baker’s centennial. The recording features two original pieces composed by Imani members that depict Baker’s life, including French horn player Jeff Scott’s seven-movement La Belle Sirène Comme le Comédien and flautist Valerie Coleman’s Suite: Portraits of Josephine.
These and other materials about Josephine Baker, including a robust clipping file, can be found at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) in Chicago.
Founded at Columbia College Chicago in 1983, The Center for Black Music Research is the only organization of its kind. It exists to illuminate the significant role that black music plays in world culture by serving as a nexus for all who value black music, by promoting scholarly thought and knowledge about black music, and by providing a safe haven for the materials and information that document the black music experience across Africa and the diaspora.
Melanie Zeck is the Managing Editor of the Black Music Research Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the Center for Black Music Research. She is currently co-authoring a book (OUP, forthcoming) on aspects of black music history with Samuel A. Floyd Jr., CBMR founder and Director Emeritus.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Wednesday, 28 May marks the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mary Lou William. Williams was an African-American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and contemporary of both Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, is often overlooked as a key contributor to the jazz movement of the 20th century.
Born in Atlanta, Williams had her first taste of arranged music while attending church in her hometown. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 only spiked her interest in music, specifically jazz, as the city was a stop on the Theater Owners Booking association route, a vaudeville circuit for African-American performers.
Williams was first able to truly experiment with her musical talents as the pianist and arranger for the band Andy Kirk’s 12 Cloud’s of Joy. She came to this opportunity through her husband, who was the saxophonist for the band. Williams continued to arrange for the group creating household hits like “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Little Joe from Chicago,” and “Roll ‘em” until her departure from the band in 1942.
Mary Lou Williams by William Gottlieb, c. 1946. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Williams’s arrangements were not limited to Andy Kirk’s band. Her compositions were featured by jazz greats including, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. The New York Philharmonic performed Williams’s Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946. The Suite was composed of twelve arrangements, each labeled for a sign of the zodiac and all inspired by different jazz musicians.
Facing gender barriers in the states that hindered wide-spread success, Williams traveled to Europe in the 1950s. After performing in both London and Paris, Williams’s returned to the Unites States and simultaneously entertained a brief intermission in her musical career to concentrate her efforts on more religious pursuits.
Returning to music in the late 1950s, Williams reentered the scene with more of a devout lens. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Williams composed a number of religious arrangements and musical masses including “Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres,” “Mass for Lenten Season,” and most notably “Mass for Peace and Justice” which was later renamed “Mary Lou’s Mass.” This last mass was the musical backdrop to Alvin Ailey’s series of dances presented under the same name and was also performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975 as the first jazz music performed in this iconic cathedral.
Williams returned to secular composing in the last decade of her life and also worked as an artist-in-residence at Duke University up until her death in 1981.
Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer Mary Lou Williams. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
You’d probably be lying if you said that you didn’t spend at least a moderate amount of time during your childhood banging on various and sundry items that happened to be within reach. If we’re being honest, this particular sort of self-expression doesn’t seem to lessen with age; thankfully, our methods tend to get more sophisticated over time.
However, sometimes it’s fitting to go back to the primal days of beating anything that will make noise. Making your own percussion instruments can be a great way fully to understand sound, timbre, and tone. If you have music students or teach a drumline, having your students build their own drums can be a fantastic learning experience for everyone involved.
Before we get into the specifics about how to perfect your own DIY percussion instruments, let’s get some inspiration from some of the big names in homemade instruments.
Learn from the professionals
Most of us have some experience appropriating household items in our music-making endeavors, but the people behind the show STOMP have turned this pastime into an art form. This unique live show has a 20th anniversary quickly approaching, with tickets for the celebration show in New York City selling fast.
Using everything from trash-can lids to their own bodies, this is as good as it gets when it comes to DIY instruments.
If you’re looking for another great source of inspiration, look no further than Recycled Percussion – a “quintessentially Vegas” experience that boasts of having performed more than 4,000 shows worldwide. Quite a few of the band’s instruments will look quite familiar; they’re no strangers to homemade instruments made from pots, pans, scrap metal and even automobile parts.
Use What’s Around You
Tuning a steel drum with a Peterson strobe electronic tuner. Photo by Andrew Hitchcock. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Steel drums, or pans, has its roots in Western Africa, and its sound remains intrinsically linked with the spirit of the Caribbean. It really is a singular sound, and even the most basic steel pans – those made of recycled 55-gallon drums – are capable of producing utterly captivating sounds.
Building and tuning your own steelpan is time-intensive, but certainly not impossible, as this video from SmartyPansMusic demonstrates. Even if you don’t have the time or any spare oil drums lying around, there’s a good chance that you can find some suitable materials not far from where you live. Here are some ideas.
PVC Pipes: Whoever it was that first looked at a PVC pipe and said “I can make music with that” was clearly a visionary. PVC pipes are fairly inexpensive, as far as building materials go, and can produce an almost shocking range of sounds.
To get a sense of what’s possible with PVC pipes, check out this wonderful video from a guy who played some recognizable tunes including “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Viva la Vida.” The interesting thing about this type of instrument is that the sounds it produces is less about the sound of two objects colliding and more about the manipulation of the air within the pipes. The major variables you’ll be playing with are the lengths and widths of the pipes.
Scrap Metal: If you want to create your own STOMP experience at home, it may be time to “rescue” some scrap metal to create your own percussion instruments. Companies like McElroy Metal have sites in many states throughout the U.S., and offer a variety of materials to choose from, in different sizes and shapes.
Scrap metal / offcuts at Toruń Centre for Astronomy, Toruń, Poland. Photograph by Mike Peel. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Slum Drummers is a group of Kenyan-born musicians who have brilliantly combined scrap-metal instruments with public outreach; their mission is to spread not only a love of music, but also an awareness of cultural issues such as drug use. From humble beginnings in scrap yards, these musicians and their castaway pieces of metal have gone on to inspire audiences across the world.
Buckets: It really is amazing what can be accomplished with some ordinary household items. If you’re working with a somewhat tighter budget, or a trip to a scrap yard simply isn’t in the cards for you, buckets might just be the way to go.
You can experiment with different materials, such as plastic and metal, as well as with different thicknesses. Buckets are some of the simplest and most utilitarian household items at our disposal, but they can produce a wide array of sounds. You’ll also want to try different methods of striking the buckets; traditional drumsticks are great, but you could try differently sized pieces of wood or even metal to really get the perfect tone.
Street Drummer, by Nicholas Erwin. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via nickerwin Flickr.
Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment
No matter what materials you end up choosing, some experimentation will be in order before you get the sound you’re looking for. Modern drum kits work the way they do because of resonant heads and strategically placed air holes. Some trial and error is necessary to see what works best for the materials you’ve chosen.
Experimenting with different types of materials can be a really instructive experience for music students. It’s one thing to have a measure of skill as a musician, but quite another to understand precisely how it is that our favorite instruments create their sound. To that end, homemade drums are a great place to start.
Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
(b Geelong, Victoria, 18 Aug 1951). Australian composer, performer, installation and sound artist, instrument inventor, writer, educator, and researcher. Her early education consisted of high school in both Australia and Canada, followed by a BA (1971, Monash University), Dip Ed (1973, Monash), MA (1974, Monash), and PhD (1983, Monash). An interest in experimental music is apparent from her earliest compositions, many of which involve performance in specific places, improvisation, electronics, graphic notation, and the use of self-built and specially built instruments. These include Improvisations in Acoustic Chambers, 1981, and Soft and Fragile: Music in Glass and Clay, 1982. By 1977 an interest in sound installation and sound sculpture had become well established in her work (Winds and Circuits, Surfaces and Cavities), and is an area in which she has continued to the present day, having presented nearly 50 sound installations worldwide.
Bandt has also been involved in creating electro-acoustic works, often in collaboration with broadcasting organizations; work for or with radio forms a significant portion of her output. Many of these works, while using real-world elements, take a more narrative or illustrative approach to their material compared to the abstractionism of much electro-acoustic work. An electro-acoustic work such as Mungo (1992), made of sounds collected in the Lake Mungo region of New South Wales, presents soundscape as illustration; that is, the sounds are presented as important in themselves, rather than as material for formalistic musical development. In other electro-acoustic works, such as Thrausmata: Ancient Greek Fragments, 1997, the concern for narrative, and presenting endangered elements of the soundscape (in this case, disappearing languages) emerge as paramount. Other electro-acoustic works present sounds from specific environmental sites, such as Genesis (1983), for microtonally-tuned zither and pre-recorded speed-changed zither, both recorded in the same large resonant environment, and Stack (2000), made entirely from sounds collected from a large cylindrical tunnel exhaust stack in Melbourne. Of her compositions for instruments, Ocean Bells (1982) uses the Flagong, a glass instrument made by Bandt modelled on Harry Partch’s Cloud Chamber Bowls. The sculpture Aeolian Harps (1987) was a large wind powered string instrument, which was also recorded and those sounds used in a number of other works. Her recent Tragoudia II uses the tarhu, a 12-string spike fiddle (4 strings played, 8 sympathetic) invented by Australian luthier Peter Biffin, as well as pre-recorded sounds recorded in Crete. Tin Rabbit (2009–10) for wind-up rabbits, pre-recorded soundscape, music boxes, and tin suitcase shows a more whimsical side of her installation work. Free Diving (2008) for recorder orchestra and pre-recorded soundscape shows an integration of her interests in environmental sound with that of composing for traditional instruments.
Bandt has been equally active in collaborative work with musicians, dancers, and artists. She has been part of the groups La Romanesca (early music performance), LIME (improvisation), Back to Back Zithers (cross-cultural improvisation and composition), and Carte Blanche (a digital media duo with Brigid Burke), among others. She has also worked on many collaborative projects, such as Hear the Dance, See the Music (1989), a collaborative music-dance-technology performance; The White Room (1992), an installation for Warsaw Autumn, produced with Vineta Lagzdina, Warren Burt, Ernie Althoff, and Alan Lamb; and an ongoing series of collaborations with the German sound artist Johannes S. Sistermanns.
Bandt has written several books, including Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Sydney, 2001), the first comprehensive treatment of this kind of work in Australia. With Michelle Duffy and Dolly MacKinnon, she edited the anthology Hearing Places: Interdisciplinary Writings on Sound, Place, Time and Culture (Cambridge, 2007). She is also the director of the Australian Sound Design Project, the first comprehensive website and on-line resource, documenting over 130 Australian sound designers, composers, and sound sculptors. She has received grants from the Australian Research Council, The Australia Council, the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and a number of other organizations. Her work has been broadcast on, and commissioned by ORF Austria, WDR Germany, ABC Australia, and Japanese Radio and TV, among others. Recordings of her work are available on the Move, New Albion, Ars Acustica, Sonic Art Gallery, and Au Courant labels, among others.
Writings
Sounds In Space: Windchimes and Sound Sculptures (Melbourne, 1985)
Creative Approaches to Interactive Technology in Sound Art (Geelong, 1990)
Sound Sculpture, Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Sydney, 2001)
Edited with M. Duffy and D. MacKinnon: Hearing Places: Interdisciplinary Writings on Sound, Place, Time and Culture (Cambridge, 2007) [incl. CD]
M. Atherton: ‘Ros Bandt’, Australian Made Australian Played (Sydney, 1990), 90–92
B. Broadstock: ‘Ros Bandt’, Sound Ideas – Australian Composers born since 1950 (Sydney, 1995), 42–7
J. Jenkins: ‘Ros Bandt’, 22 Australian Composers (Melbourne, 1988), 9–21
A. McLennan: ‘A brief topography of Australian Sound Art and experimental broadcasting’, Continuum, viii (1994), 302–18 (electronic arts in Australia issue, ed. N. Zurbrugg)
R. Coyle: Sound In space (Sydney, 1995), 8–16
P. Read: ‘Silo Stories’, Haunted Earth (Sydney, 2003), 93–110
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Brian Eno turns 66 today. It has become a cliché to start every profile of Eno by noting the eclecticism and longevity of his musical career. After all, here is a man who made his performance debut smashing a piece of wood against an open piano frame (La Monte Young, X (Any Integer) for Henry Flynt) and went on to produce award-winning albums for chart-topping bands.Nonetheless, it is still startling to realize that a quick game of One Degree of Brian Eno can bring together musicians as diverse as Cornelius Cardew, Luciano Pavarotti, Nico, Karl Hyde, and Coldplay. Eno’s credits include composer, singer, keyboardist, producer, clarinetist, video artist, and app designer; his music has been heard in concert halls, arenas, airports, movie theaters, and art galleries. Thanks to the start-up sounds he wrote for Windows 95, Eno might well have been the most-played composer of the 1990s. Not bad for someone who has embraced the label of “non-musician.”
It is impossible to give a brief yet coherent overview of a career that continues to be so rich and wide-ranging. Instead, and in honor of his 66th birthday, here are six of my favorite Eno contributions to our musical world.
(1) Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra from Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics
Formed in 1970 by composer Gavin Bryars, the Portsmouth Sinfonia opened its membership to all–instrumental competence is not required. Its distinctive sounds come from the resulting mix of complete neophytes and trained musicians. Eno played the clarinet with them on and off for four years, and produced two of their three albums. The Sinfonia’s performance of Also sprach Zarathustra is typical in its chaotic, yet recognizable, attempt to play only the most famous part of Strauss’s half-hour tone poem.
Discreet Music is Eno’s first foray into what he would later call “ambient music.” In a now-famous anecdote, Eno claims its genesis in a failure of technology. While recovering at home after a serious accident, Eno was left with a recording that was playing too softly and only out of one channel. Unable to get up to fix the sound, he listened to barely audible output and discovered a new way of hearing. After Discreet, music no longer had to be the center of attention. It could be loops of deliberately simple music that become “part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.”
(3) Penguin Café Orchestra, “Chartered Flight,” from Music from the Penguin Café (released in 1976 on Obscure; Eno, executive producer)
In 1975, following the success of Eno’s solo albums, Island Records created the Obscure label for him. Although short-lived (ten albums in three years), Obscure gave Eno the opportunity to introduce to a wider audience music they might not otherwise encounter. The quirky and charming Music from Penguin Café Orchestra was Obscure 7.
(4) U2, “The Unforgettable Fire” from The Unforgettable Fire, produced by Eno and Daniel Lanois (1984)
Given the critical and commercial enormous success Eno and U2 have enjoyed together, it is easy to forget that many–including Eno himself–found this an odd and risky collaboration when they first came together on The Unforgettable Fire. U2 famously brought Eno in so his “arty” and “weird” influence could change the band’s sound. (Bono: “We didn’t go to art school, we went to Brian.”) The album’s title track shows Eno’s introduction of a more atmospheric soundscape to U2’s previously straight-forward anthemic rock style.
Another Day on Earth was Eno’s first solo album of songs since the 1970s. Appropriately for Eno’s first album as a soloist for over a quarter of a century, the opening track “This” features not just his voice, but his voice multi-tracked as he intones the title over thirty times in this three-minute song. The result is an impossibly catchy tune that pairs Eno’s solemn, almost hypnotic singing with an infectiously catchy rhythmic accompaniment.
(6) Eno and Peter Chilvers, “Bloom” (2008)
“Bloom” brings Eno’s interests in ambient music and generative music to the iPhone. Billed as “an endless music machine” and a “music box for the 21st century,” this app allows you to create soundscapes reminiscent of Eno’s ambient experiments of the 1970s and 1980s by simply tapping on the screen. If you so choose, you can also experience your musical creation as a part of your ambience by allowing a generative player to take over. “Bloom” manages to be both addictive and soothing at the same time.
Happy birthday, Brian Eno. Our current musical landscape would be so much less interesting without you.
Cecilia Sun is an Assistant Professor of musicology in the Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She updated the Brian Eno entry for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, and she has an essay on Eno and the experimental tradition in the forthcoming collection Brian Eno: Oblique Strategies.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
4–10 May 2014. The annual Eurovision week offers Europeans a chance to put aside their differences and celebrate, nation against nation, the many ways in which music unites them. Each nation has the same opportunity—a “Eurosong” of exactly three minutes, performed by no more than six musicians or dancers, in the language of their choice, national or international—to represent Europe for a year. Since its founding in 1956, one of the deepest moments of the Cold War, as Soviet tanks prepared to enter Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has provided a counterpoint to European politics, providing a moment when Europeans witnessed claims to a common Europeanness.
In early spring 2014, however, as the Ukraine crisis unfolded, the ESC seemed deaf to the deterioration of European politics. A few songs expressed soft nationalism; hardly any made more than a mild gesture toward human rights. Granted, the competitive run of most national entries—through local, regional, and then national competitions—began before the Ukraine crisis, before the occupation of the Maidan in Kyiv, the Russian annexation of the Crimea, and the violent turn of separatism in Eastern Ukraine. The Eurovision Song Contest, nonetheless, had lost its moral compass. It was veering dangerously close to irrelevance for a Europe in crisis.
All that changed during Eurovision week. Though Austria’s Conchita Wurst, the female persona of 25-year-old singer Tom Neuwirth, had captured the attention of many with her sincere flamboyance, she was favored by few and shunned by many, particularly the countries of Eastern Europe. As the evening of the Grand Finale arrived, however, few doubted that Conchita Wurst would emerge victorious, and many realized that their worst fears were about to be realized. Europe had found Conchita’s voice, and she truly did “Rise Like a Phoenix” from the stage of the Copenhagen Eurovision stage.
As I write this blogpost in the immediate wake of the Grand Finale, the explanations and evaluations of Conchita Wurst’s victory at the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest spread across the European media and beyond. Standing on stage in a gown bathed in golden glitter, the bearded Conchita sang powerfully and with full conviction that there was more at stake than finding the right formula for the winning song. “This night is dedicated to all who believe in peace and freedom,” she proclaimed upon receiving the trophy. Supporters and detractors alike saw the moment as evidence that the queering of the ESC had finally and fully come of age. Eurovision historian, Jan Feddersen, had predicted as much in the Berlin liberal newspaper, tageszeitung, the day before. The queering of the ESC had given common meaning to Europe. Feddersen writes: “One communicates throughout the year. What could be a greater cultural flow of Europeanness, even independent of the borders of the European Union” (taz.europa, 9 May 2014, p. 9).
The political and aesthetic trajectory of queering, of course, is precisely not to come of age, rather to engender and regender critical questions of identity and ideology. It is this moving with and beyond queering that Conchita Wurst’s victory signals. The winning song, “Rise Like a Phoenix,” provides, thus, an anthem of a Europe of post-queerness. The Eurosong and the tens of millions who embrace it as their own enter a European space opened by diversity.
In the months and years before Conchita Wurst’s victory on Saturday night, there were probably few grounds that would lead one to predict a winning song for Austria. The self-styled “Land of Music,” Austria simply could not figure out the Eurovision Song Contest. In recent years, it had sent wacky folk-like music and banal power ballads, only occasionally passing beyond the semi-final competitions. For much of the 2010s, Austria sent no entry at all. If Austria was perplexed about its musical presence in the ESC, Conchita Wurst was not. Born in Styria, Tom Neuwirth dedicated himself to a music of difference, a music that provoked, and a music that did political work. As the drag queen, Conchita Wurst (most readers will recognize “Wurst” as the German word for sausage, but in Austria, it is also commonly used in the phrase, “es ist mir wurst,” meaning “it’s all the same to me”), performs songs of action, directed against prejudice and mustered for diversity. There is no contradiction when queerness and nationalism occupy common ground, all the more in an Austria that provides shelter to a higher percentage of refugees than any other European nation. When Conchita remarked upon qualifying after the second semi-final on May 8, announcing proudly that “I’m going to do all I can for my country,” there was no irony.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2014 had found its voice. The ESC had returned to Europe. At a critical moment of struggle in Ukraine, when right-wing European political parties on the eve of European parliamentary elections are calling for their nations to retreat from Europe, the ESC has reclaimed its relevance, and it has done so by recognizing its historical foundations. In many ways, Conchita Wurst, performing as a transvestite, offers a less provocative stage presence than the transsexual Dana International, who won for Israel in 1998 and competed again in 2011. ESC queerness begins to demonstrate the attributes of a historical longue durée, and it is for these reasons that it elevates a music competition to a European level on which it is one of the most visible targets for official Russian homophobia and the violation of human rights elsewhere in Europe. It is a return to that history that “Rise Like a Phoenix” so powerfully signifies.
On Saturday night, there were other entries that took their place in the more diverse, post-queer Europe given new and different meaning by Conchita Wurst. Political meaning accrued to songs in which it had previously remained neutral (e.g., Pollapönk’s “No Prejudice” for Iceland, and Molly’s “Children of the Universe” for the United Kingdom). Several quite outstanding songs came to envoice a fragile Europe in need of change (e.g., Elaiza’s mixture of cabaret and klezmer in “Is It Right” for Germany, and András Kállay-Saunders’s “Running” for Hungary). Kállay-Saunders transformed the narrative of an abused child to a call for action in European human rights. The son of Pharaoh Saunders, Kállay-Saunders is a stunning presence on stage, an African American Hungarian, calling attention to the violation of human rights while representing a nation sliding to the right, so much so that many Hungarian artists, musicians, and intellectuals (e.g., András Schiff) will not enter their homeland.
On Sunday morning, 11 May, the Berlin tageszeitung opened its lead article on the Eurovision Song Contest with the celebratory claim, “there is hope for Europe.” It is perhaps too early to claim that we are witnessing music and nationalism in a new key. From early April until the Grand Finale, I gave a regular series of newspaper, radio, and television interviews in Germany, where I currently teach as Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel, and I realize only now that my own observations about nationalism and the ESC underwent radical change, all the more as Conchita Wurst brought a new Europe into focus (see, e.g., the interview with the Austrian-German-Swiss network, 3sat, just before the Grand Finale). The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) itself had predicted 120 million viewers, but estimates the day after the Grand Finale raised the number to 180 million, a fifty-percent increase. Nationalisms proliferate often; rarely do they subside. In the Ukraine crisis, each side accuses the other of being nationalistic, laying claim to their own right to be nationalistic. These are the nationalisms in the old key, collapsing in upon themselves. In contrast it may be a quality of a post-queer Eurovision Song Contest that it can foster a nationalism of tolerance and diversity, and that its song for Europe truly rises like a phoenix, enjoining the many rather than the few to join the chorus.
Philip V. Bohlman is Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Currently, he serves as Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel, and on the editorial board of Grove Music Online. He writes widely on music and nationalism, most recently Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (Routledge 2011). He is writing the book, Music after Nationalism, for Oxford University Press, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
April is Jazz Appreciation Month, honoring an original American art form. Across the United States and the world, jazz lovers are introducing people to the history and heritage of jazz as well as extraordinary contemporary acts. To celebrate, here are eight songs from renowned jazz singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong‘s catalog, along with some lesser-known facts about the artist.
Heebie Jeebies (1926)
One of Armstrong’s first recordings as bandleader was a series of singles released under the name Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, which were later regarded as a watershed moment in the history of jazz. “Heebie Jeebies” in particular gained fame, and historical importance, for its improvised “scat” chorus; according to legend, this off-the-cuff vocal part was the result of Armstrong dropping his sheet music during the recording.
Struttin’ With Some Barbecue (1927)
Armstrong’s second wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, was instrumental in orchestrating his rise to prominence. Hardin was also an accomplished jazz pianist and composer, frequently collaborating with Armstrong; “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” is one of her most-beloved contributions to the jazz canon.
Muggles (1928)
Long before J.K. Rowling transformed the word, “muggles” was a slang term for marijuana, a drug of which Armstrong was a lifelong enthusiast. This highly-esteemed composition by Armstrong was recorded with a group of the day’s foremost jazz talents, among them the legendary pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines.
Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1929)
Although Armstrong had achieved renown among black listeners through his work in the ‘20s, it was this song, performed between acts during the Broadway musical Hot Chocolates, which arguably gained him his first crossover success. Originally written as an excuse to have Armstrong sing from the orchestra pit, its success led the producers to rewrite the script in order to bring him onstage, then send him to the studio to record the production’s hits.
Where The Blues Were Born In New Orleans (1947)
The film New Orleans featured Armstrong alongside Billie Holiday, in her only film role; the pair portrayed musicians who develop a romantic relationship. This track includes a lengthy section in which Armstrong introduces his ensemble, featured in the film, which was loaded with the day’s biggest names: Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Bud Scott, and more.
Mack the Knife (1955)
In the later decades of his career, Armstrong’s lip muscles no longer allowed him to perform the same kind of trumpet pyrotechnics he’d become known for earlier in his career. As a result, he began to rely more on pop vocal performances, such as this, one of his best-known songs of all time. Taken from The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s anticapitalist stage drama, “Mack” became a major pop success (although it did not achieve the same recognition as the white singer Bobby Darin’s #1 version, released four years later).
Hello, Dolly (1964)
Probably the biggest hit of Armstrong’s career, this song, taken from the eponymous musical, took the #1 spot on the pop charts from the Beatles during the height of Beatlemania.
What a Wonderful World (1967)
Perhaps surprisingly, this song — perhaps the tune most closely associated with Armstrong — was not a hit in America upon its release, selling only about 1000 copies. Over time, owing to its frequent use in films and numerous cover versions, the song would eclipse all others in Armstrong’s discography to become his signature recording, but not until long after his death in 1971.
Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Louis Armstrong, jazz trumpeter, 1953. World-Telegram staff photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Many music students have difficulty finding new venues in which to perform. A lot of the time it’s because we let our school schedule our performances for us. We’ll start the semester and circle the dates on the calendars that include our concerts and recitals, and that will be it. That’s fine, and can keep you pretty busy, but I’m here to tell you to get out there and plan on your own. You’ll become much more confident and even perform better at your concerts once you get a few smaller gigs under your belt. Here’s a few tips to help you along the way:
Don’t let nerves get in the way of gigging
You’ve likely heard this from countless professors, teachers, friends, and family members, but everyone experiences nervousness. It’s the result of our animal instincts, our fight or flight response, and it’s natural. The solution is simply to gain experience. Think of each instance of nervousness as a new chance to conquer and control the sensation. After enough repetitions, nervousness will no longer seem like such a big deal, just an expected and regular part of performance. Nerves will probably never go completely away, but by the time you get to a huge concert you’ll be getting used to it.
Develop your personal brand
Whether you like it or not, self-advertising, or creating your own brand, has become more and more doable thanks to the Internet. Read up on creating a web presence. Unless you’re famous, you’re going to need to market your talents. Sites like BandCamp and SoundCloud tend to be synonymous with popular music, but this trend is slowly changing. In fact, many classical musicians are uploading recordings of their gigs to SoundCloud.
On top of the benefits of a clean, easy to navigate repository of gig recordings, having a SoundCloud is like having a deluxe portfolio. What do I mean by “deluxe”? Well, it’s like having a resume with a built in audience of employers ready to look at it 24/7. And SoundCloud isn’t just a social network; it’s a social network of people who actively create and/or listen to music.
Think outside the box when looking for gigs
But where can you look for gigs? At first glance you’re at a slight disadvantage from all the rock bands that can play cover shows at bars or parties. Somehow playing solo clarinet music at the local bar just isn’t going to go over well. So, here are a few places you may not have thought of:
1. University events
Keep tabs on ongoing events at your university. Many students and faculty would love to have their events spiced up with some “sophisticated” music. There are plenty of fundraisers and galas that are always looking for entertainment. It even gives them a bragging point to have a student performing and could lead to more donations for the school.
2. Elementary schools
Music education is an important aspect of many children’s lives, and choosing an instrument to pick up can be quite a meaningful decision, even if it may seem superfluous to us at the time. Check with local elementary schools to find out when they start their students off in band and orchestra programs. They may very well be looking for people to come in and explain and play their instruments to students. You never know when you could be the one to inspire the next great performer.
Children from Kaneohe Elementary School clap to the beat of one of the many jazzy songs the US Marine Corps Forces Pacific Party Band played during their performance as part of the Music in the Schools program. Photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
3. Retirement communities
Playing at a retirement community may not be very glamorous, but it will leave you with experience and the feeling that you’ve done a good service. One of the most rewarding times of my musical career was playing at a nursing home. A deaf woman rolled her wheelchair up to my marimba and put her hand on the side to feel the vibrations. Seeing her smile is something I will never forget. To me, this small gig was right up there with playing in Orchestra Hall in Chicago.
4. Play for small businesses and company functions
A gig at a barber shop didn’t give me a huge audience, but it’s not always the size that matters. Through it I was able to meet some people from a mattress store called Dr. Snooze, and eventually led to me getting to play at one of their open houses. I met several more people through it that led to even more performance opportunities, including corporate retreats and even a wedding. I can also use them as a reference when telling others about my music. It’s amazing how one “little” gig can turn into so much more.
5. Play on the street
Now you should look into the legality of this strategy before pursuing it, but playing in the street (even for no money) can be an incredible source of publicity. Who knows who might be looking? It also helps to strategically pick your location so that people who might be more likely to need musicians may listen. Another idea you could try would be to upload recordings of your performances to YouTube to be able to show them to others.
Finnish bluegrass buskers in Helsinki, Finland. June 2006. Photo by Cory Doctorow from London, UK. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
All of these ideas will give you some great experience and help you become a better musician. And when you come to the bigger events, you’ll be well prepared.
Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Just in time for April Fool’s Day we are pleased to announce the results of this year’s Grove Music Online Spoof Article contest.
This year’s submissions were all biographies, perhaps because Grove’s stylistic prescriptions for biographies lend themselves well to parody. Competition was fierce and hilarious. One of our judges reports, “You all made me spill my coffee. Twice.”
Deane Root, editor in chief of Grove Music Online, and Professor of Music, Director and Fletcher Hodges, Jr. Curator of the Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh, has been immersed in Grove style since he worked under Stanley Sadie on the first New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance served as editor in chief for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition. He is currently working on Joking Matters, a book that explores music, humor, and contemporary culture.
Anna-Lise Santella edits Grove Music/Oxford Music Online as well as the music modules of Oxford Bibliographies and Oxford Handbooks Online. She spends a lot of time with style guides and once read the 1927 edition of Grove cover to cover for fun.
We received a number of excellent selections, all of which observed Grove style and took care to include some plausible details among the ludicrous so that they might pass muster.
Judge Root noted, “It’s very difficult to choose among these four offerings. Indeed, in wit and prose most seem to have flowed from the fingertips of the same inspired author.” Judge Root was right about that: Three of our four shortlisted articles were written by a single author. Root added, “This year brings us brief biographical entries, thumbnail sketches of inspired beings in whom some of us might find our imaginary Doppelgänger.”
***
Third runner up:
Bach, Davide Adolphus Iestyn (b Rimsting, Bavaria 29 Feb 1764, d Merthyr Tydfil, Wales 22 Apr 1833), German composer, organist, and political agitator. A distant relative of J.S. Bach, D.A.I. Bach’s early career is veiled in obscurity. It is known from the personal letters of his father, Johann Maldwyn Bach (1740 – 1800) that D.A.I. Bach moved to the home of his paternal great grandmother in Fochriw, Wales in 1785 following a failed attempt to poison the Elector of Rimsting in protest about the feudal laws still employed in Bavaria at that time. He is credited with establishing the tradition of Lutheran hymn singing in Wales, translating Ein Feste Burg into Welsh for the Eisteddfod at Corwen in 1789. His most famous work is the ‘Steam’ Cantata (Schnell,Schneller, am Schnellsten!) written to celebrate the first journey of Richard Trevithick’s steam engine from Merthyr Tydfil to Penydarren in 1804. He was implicated as a ring leader of the Merthyr Riots of 1831, describing himself as a ‘solider for freedom’. He escaped punishment by disguising himself as an iron worker at the famous Dowlais works. His opera Uumo di Ferro, a semi-autobiographical account of this episode, was revived in 1987 as part of the Urdd Eisteddfod in Merthyr Tydfil. Bach’s involvement in Welsh political protest earned him a reference in the folk song Sospan Fach (‘D.A.I. Bach y sowldiwr’). In a cruel twist of fate, D.A.I. Bach died on the same day as Trevithick in 1833, following a railway accident.
Bibliography
ed. Llewellyn Ein Brief Aus Rimsting: the letters of Johann Maldwyn Bach (Treorchy, 1933)
Cyfansoddiadau llenyddol buddugol: Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Urdd Gobaith Cymru, Merthyr Tudful a’r Cylch 1987 (Cardiff 1987)
V. Jones The Iron Men of Merthyr (Bangor, 2009)
Root notes, “Another long-lost member of the prolific family: a cwrthed Bach perhaps? Surely those lacking facility with the Welsh language are missing some humor here (“dai bach” means little David, raising expectations for references to slingshots and giants).” Judge Santella added, “This article gets bonus points for including references to actual events that leant it the air of plausibility and for including Welsh phrases that stood up to my (admittedly limited) translation abilities. It lacked, however, a signature, which is not only a missed opportunity for additional hilarity, but also against Grove’s preferred style for an article that includes bibliography. This article was submitted by Steven Griffin.
***
Second runner up:
Humble, Maria Felicity (b Hampshire, 1762, d Hampshire, 1813). English composer and pianist. Initially denied the musical tuition bestowed on her four brothers, Humble was eventually permitted to attend lessons by her parents, a vicar and his wife, after her threat to hold her breath for a dangerously long time led to an incident in which the parish doctor had to be called, at considerable expense and embarrassment to the family. This was the last in a series of subversive acts undertaken by Humble in protest at her exclusion; others included doctoring her father’s sermons shortly before church services, resulting in some unfortunate declarations from the pulpit.
Humble proved to be skilful and naturally musical, soon outstripping her brothers in her aptitude at the keyboard, and in her understanding of harmony, counterpoint, singing, and composition. The resultant humiliation felt by her brothers manifested itself in a number of resentful gestures, including the destruction or defacement of many of Humble’s scores. Of those that survive, most bear the marks of sibling rage, with one set of handwriting in particular – identified to be that of her youngest brother, Percy – revealing a highly scatological mind.
Humble resorted to keeping her works locked in a bureau; as a consequence, none were performed or published during her lifetime. Pieces include numerous highly accomplished songs and piano sonatas, some of which have been hailed by Charles Rosen as ‘superior even to Beethoven’.
Bibliography
C. Rosen, Forgotten Classical Masters (London and New York, 1972), 56–62
F. Tinkle, From Humble Origins to an Even Humbler Reputation (London, 1964)
JOSEPH KERMA
Judge Root observes, “Reflecting timely concerns about sexist male suppression of female creativity and sibling rivalry among composers, this bio presents a remarkable amount of familial dirty linen for someone whose birth and death dates are unknown, and draws in two late male authorities who might have been reluctant to be associated with this Humble musician, no matter the sardonic Felicity.” Judge Santella concurs that the level of detail combined with the signature would have made her suspicious. “This would not have gotten by us, but I am 100% in favor of the title of F. Tinkle’s biography.”
***
First runner up:
Fogger-Houndsmilk, George (b Guildford, 24 August 1937, d Kingston upon Hull, 26 December 1999). English composer, pianist and folksong collector. He was educated at Winchester College and then at Hull, where he encountered the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985). Fogger-Houndsmilk, who was published under the name George Houndsmilk, set Larkin’s poetry to music in his song cycle, The Librarian (1956), but Larkin dismissed him as ‘a second-rate churner of dubious ditties’. The cycle was published incorrectly as The Libertarian, but was so successful in that guise that Houndsmilk made no attempt to alter the title in later editions.
Houndsmilk enjoyed considerable commercial success with his settings of English folk music. Songs include Rosemary Cheesecloth, Plump Puddens, Bishop Littlebreath’s Farewell, The Saucy Skipper of Scarborough, Lewisham Fair, Shropshire Blue, Sweet Catford Sue, Newcassel Town Hall, The Red-breasted Merganser of Merseyside, Slippy Willie, and Seven Farmers Went A-Drinking and Never Came Back. Houndsmilk’s settings were issued by the eminent publisher Henry Cassocks.
Houndsmilk married Hattie Bloxham, a former barmaid celebrated for her forthright singing style. Bloxham gave numerous recitals of Houndsmilk’s songs, with her husband at the piano. They had six children, including the poet and literary critic Celia Bloxham-Houndsmilk. George Houndsmilk died of injuries sustained during the collapse of a negligently-constructed wheelbarrow.
Bibliography
S.L. St Bernard: To Hull and Back: The Cultural Life of England’s Most Underrated City (Cambridge, 1972), 72–81
M. Bowdler: Plump Puddens: The Tawdry World of George “Foggy” Houndsmilk and Hattie Bloxham (London, 1991)
VALERIE LANGFIELD
“Those consummate British folksong collectors with their school ties and countrified lineage; where does the real end, and the imaginary begin?” asked Judge Root. “With Larkin as the poet one might have expected this composer to jazz it up, but the list of cheesy settings reveals other interests. And what the composer was doing beneath the barrow we’d best not know.”
***
And the winner is:
Henderson, Lucas John (b Philadelphia, 19 June, 1910, d Appenzell, Switzerland, 27 November, 1987). American composer. His style encompassed the avant garde and, later, post-modernism, including works which paid tribute to, or satirised, the music of other composers. His 1956 piece, Cage, an homage to John Cage, consists of a cage, the bars of which have been loosely interwoven with violin strings. The performer, who need not be a violinist, is required to pluck the strings while emulating the movements of a bird. In a follow-up to this work, Byrd-Cage (for performer, cage and tape, 1958), a recording of Byrd’s motet Siderum rector is played throughout the performance. When the original score to Henderson’s satirical fusion of Stravinsky and Beethoven, Oiseau de für Elise (for voice and Bunsen burner) was destroyed by fire, Henderson ceased composing altogether, retiring to a life of quiet solitude in the Swiss village of Appenzell.
Bibliography
N. Doggerel, The Anechoic Chambers of the Mind (New York, 1967)
KEITH G. GRAFING
Judge Root opined, “The name puns here are surprising and delightful, as are the inventively prepared birdcage and the implied hazards of modern-music performance. This mashup of music composers, styles, and titles—brief though it be—earns my nod as our spoof-of-the-year.” The rest of the judges agreed. “It’s the only one that made me laugh out loud,” said Judge Garrett, and Judge Santella admitted it was the perpetrator of the aforementioned coffee incident.
***
Congratulations to author Joanna Wyld, who also wrote the First and Second runner up entries. She is the winner of $100 in OUP books and a year’s subscription to Grove Music Online.
Many thanks to all of our entrants for your creativity! We hope you’ll join us again next year!
And finally, our original contest announcement elicited our first ever errata correction for an earlier spoof article. William Walderman wrote to correct the article on Dag Esrum-Hellerup, which appeared in the first printing of New Grove 1.
Original:
William Walderman:
The Grove article on Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup contains a serious flaw. Dag Henrik’s father, Johann Henrik (1773-1843), supposedly appointed chamber flautist to Christian IX, died 20 years before Christian’s accession to the throne in 1863.
We tried to slip one by him by stating that it must have been Johann Henrik’s long lost identical twin brother, Johann Maria, who lived to the ripe old age of 110, that served under Christian IX, but he was too quick for us!
Are you sure it was Johann Maria – a Catholic name in a Protestant country? With the surname Esrum-Hellerup, these twins weren’t arrivals in Denmark from Bavaria or the Electoral Palatinate. Maybe his name was Johan Martin Esrum-Hellerup (probably Johan, with just one n, or else Hans or Jens).
It’s certainly difficult not to admire the lungs of a 90-year old flautist.
We certainly can’t argue with that. Thanks for your comments, Mr. Walderman!
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Music therapy involves the use of clinical, evidence-supported musical interventions to meet a patient’s specific goals for healing (a useful fact sheet). The musical therapist should have the proper credentials and be licensed in the field of music therapy.
Music therapy is performed in rehabilitation centers such as 12 Keys Rehab, psychiatric and even general hospitals, private practices, nursing homes, schools, etc. to treat a wide variety of issues, including social, cognitive, emotional, and physical needs. After an initial assessment, the musical therapist prescribes a treatment plan in which the patient sings, moves and dances, creates, or simply listens to music. This experience facilitates a healthy outlet for patients to communicate and express their feelings, in addition to rehabilitating the patient physically.
Rand De Mattei, a music instructor with Blues in the Schools, gets in tune with Petty Officer 2nd Class Tyreen S. McRae, a participant in neurologic music therapy, at Naval Medical Center San Diego Feb. 28. Neurologic music therapy helps Wounded Warriors recover. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Music therapy and special populations
As it has become more prevalent, music therapy has proven to be useful for a wide variety of populations. One such population is victims of crisis and trauma. After the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City, the American Music Therapy Association founded The New York City Music Therapy Relief Project. The goal of the project was to serve the children and adults living in the metropolitan vicinity by providing them with music therapy services. Some of these musical therapy programs were customized with the specific needs of caregivers in mind, targeting teachers, counselors, social workers, doctors, and nurses. More than 3,000 teachers and students were served through eleven different music therapy programs that reached out to eight local schools.
Music therapy has also been used in the treatment of mental illness. In addition to the basic care they should be receiving, music therapy helped patients with schizophrenia to achieve an enhanced mental state along with improving their overall condition. What’s more, music therapy has been shown to drastically reduce the unwanted symptoms these patients sometimes experience, making them more capable of having conversations with other people, thereby alleviating feelings of isolation and giving them more of an interest in what is going on around them.
Along with helping those suffering from schizophrenia, music therapy has also been used as an effective way to treat clinical depression. Studies have shown that when adolescents who were depressed listened to music, they had a notable drop in the levels of cortisol (a stress hormone), and the left frontal lobe of their brain was activated, which was reported to be a positive outcome.
Those who struggle with anger have also benefited from music therapy treatments. When assessed with the Achenbach’s Teacher’s Report Form, music therapy patients made significant improvements on the scale of aggression and hostility. Studies suggest that group sessions of music therapy allow patients to express themselves in a positive way, transforming their aggression and rage into healthier forms of communication.
While music therapy can go a long way in improving the mental health of a patient, it can also help in more physical ways. For one thing, music therapy lowers a patient’s perception of their pain so that what might normally be extremely painful becomes a much more tolerable experience. For patients suffering with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, music therapy has been known to lower incidences of nausea and anxiety, sometimes significantly lowering the fatigue, anxiety, and pain of those in hospice care.
Talking to a music therapist
I caught up with Alyssa Regan, who is in her second year in the master’s equivalency program for music therapy at Immaculata University. She’s also near the end of her full-time internship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
How have you personally seen music therapy work on someone?
I was planning on having a session with one of my patients that I had been seeing regularly since the beginning of my internship. This patient was only 16 months old and suffered from many medical complications. When I arrived at his room, I noticed an entire medical team standing around his bed; his monitor was beeping, his heart rate and respiratory rate were so erratic that numbers weren’t even showing. My patient’s face was red and he seemed to be writhing in discomfort. With approval from the medical team, I came in and began to quietly play guitar. Around the same time, the patient was given some medication. As I began to sing, my patient’s face calmed. I aimed to match the tempo of my music with his breathing and then gradually slow it down. His HR and RR appeared on the monitors and slowly decreased. After 20 minutes or so, his vitals were stable and he was asleep. After the session, one of the nurses said, “Well, either you’re a miracle worker or those drugs kicked in extremely fast!” I’m sure the medicine had a little to do with it, but it was also the music.
Since you started studying music therapy, have you seen it grow?
Yes. I think that more of the general population is beginning to recognize it as a credible field, especially as it seems to be gaining more publicity recently (e.g. the Gabby Giffords documentary and the recent segment on the news about music therapy with premature infants). I hope it continues to grow!
Is music therapy becoming more recognized in hospitals, nursing homes, etc.?
I think it is becoming more recognized in general, which hopefully means that there will be more jobs available. The most growth seems to be happening in hospice care.
How do you see music therapy expanding over the next ten years?
Ideally, I’d like music therapy to be seen as important as physical therapy, speech therapy, or occupational therapy. Will that happen over the next ten years? Probably not. However, I would not be too surprised if every hospice care organization, children’s hospital, and major medical and psychiatric institution in the United States had at least one music therapist on staff in ten years.
Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only brain sciences articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
In December I blogged about composers whose works challenge listeners to reconsider which combinations of sounds qualify as music and which do not. Interestingly, The Atlantic recently ran an article relating the details of a study that tested how much of our perception of what is “music” – in this case, pleasant, consonant music – is learned (and thus not innate). For me (and perhaps for you) there is nothing too surprising about this — there are far too many types of music in this world of ours for the perception of consonance (or, what is pleasing in music) to be innate — but it serves as a fine backdrop for what I’m about to write.
For if a penchant for consonance is not innate, then our individual definitions of music have the capability for modification and expansion. I remember the first time I heard music that challenged my ears (a piece by Anton Webern); at first I recoiled, but after a few days, when I realized the experience was sticking with me, I decided to take a second listen. Over time, I grew to appreciate and enjoy the sound of it, partly because I began to embrace the idea that music can consist of music that isn’t diatonic, and also because I began to understand Webern’s compositional methods and historical context.
Part of this new appreciation was learning more about the music, and, as a music-theorist-by-night, I thought it might be fun to take a closer analytical look at compositions written by two of the composers mentioned in my last post, just to take a closer look at what makes them tick.
Let’s start with Elliott Carter’s piece 90+ for solo piano (you can watch an excellent performance by Illya Filshtinskiy on YouTube).
For me, the salient feature of this piece is its texture, of which I hear two types. In the first, chords sustain while single notes, some of them accented (marked with the “greater than” sign in the score below), are struck at irregular intervals, as in the first six measures of the piece.
Excerpts from 90+ used with permission from Boosey & Hawkes.
In the second, the sustained chords are absent; instead single notes (for the most part), sometimes accented, skitter about all over the keyboard.
Excerpts from 90+ used with permission from Boosey & Hawkes
So much for my first-glance hearing, what does the composer have to say?
“90+ for piano is built around ninety short, accented notes…against these the context changes character…it was composed in March of 1994 to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of my dear and much admired friend, Goffredo Petrassi…”
And thus you can see, on the first page of the score near the top of this post, little numbers in parentheses — which I’ve circled — that begin counting out Petrassi’s ninety years (the little numbers only occur on the first and last pages, the last page beginning with number 85). This knowledge changes my hearing of the piece: Carter is expressing through music ninety years of a man’s life. Though his pitch and rhythmic selections still remain arcane to me at this point, the overall gesture of the piece takes on new meaning.
My second analysis involves a new piece by composer Matthew Hough (one of NPR’s “100 composers under 40”) called “Remembered States” (2011), written for nine performers. Even more so than the Carter piece, texture is by far the most prominent feature of this work, mainly due to the unconventional use of the instruments.
Excerpt from Remembered States used with permission from Hough House (ASCAP)
The piece features tactile clacking, gritty overtones, and various shimmering sounds. In this excerpt, the voice murmurs unintelligible words while the flute and trumpet follow suit “as if speaking”; the composer has called this technique “ghost playing”, a sort of shadow of the music. The clicking of the sax keys is audible, as well as the bassoon’s overtones and the coordinated chords in the piano and electric guitar. High above it all is a dry, stratospheric sustained violin note.
For me the experience is that of blurriness or semi-consciousness, where the overall effect is a sort of pixilated background out of which certain sounds stand out in stark contrast (particularly the bassoon overtones and the violin note). According to the composer, the title of the piece is meant to convey a type of remembering, where details sometimes dissipate in the background, while others jump dramatically to the fore.
While pieces like these can be challenging for some listeners, I think it is unfair to assume, as some have done, that the composers are unconcerned with connecting with their audience. I believe for many avant-garde composers today it’s more of an unconcern about conforming to perceived norms. The audience is welcome to come along for the ride if they so wish.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
I have a confession to make: I have a terrible memory. Well, for some things, anyway. I can name at least three movies and TV shows that Mary McDonnell has been in off the top of my head (Evidence of Blood, Donnie Darko, Battlestar Galactica), and rattle off the names of the seven Harry Potter books, but you take away that Beethoven piano score that I’ve been playing from since I was 14, and my fingers freeze on the keyboard. My inability to memorize music was in fact the reason I gave up on my dream of being a concert pianist—though, in retrospect, this was probably the right move for me given how lonely I would get during hours-long practice sessions…
I’ve since come to terms with my memory “deficiency,” but a recent New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini on the hegemonic influence of memorization in certain classical performing traditions brought some old feelings to the fore. Why did I have to memorize the music I was performing, especially considering how gifted I was at reading music notation (if I may say so myself)?
As Tommasini points out (citing this article by Stephen Hough), the tradition of performing from memory as a solo instrumentalist is a relatively young one, introduced by virtuosi like Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann in the 1800s. Before that, it was considered a bit gauche to play from memory, as the assumption was that if you were playing without a score in front of you, you were improvising an original piece.
I should be clear at this point that I have nothing against musicians performing from memory. Indeed some performers have the opposite problem to mine: the sight of music notation during performance is a stressor, not a helper. Nonetheless, I do feel that the stronghold that memorization has on classical soloist performance culture needs to be slackened.
One memory in particular related to memorization haunts me still. After sweating through a Bach organ trio sonata during a master class in the early 00s, the dear late David Craighead gave me some gentle praise and encouraged me to memorize the piece. “Make it your own” were his words. I was devastated. How on earth was I going to memorize such a complex piece?
In spite of my devastated feelings, I heard a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me Dr. Craighead was right. If only I could memorize the piece, it truly would be my own. I’d heard before from other teachers that the best way to completely “ingest” a piece was to practice it until you didn’t need the score anymore. The lone recital I gave from memory during my college years was admittedly an exhilarating experience; I definitely felt that I had a type of ownership over the pieces, even if I was in constant terror of having a memory lapse. In hindsight, though, I believe my sense of ownership was not a result of score-freedom, but from the hours and hours (and hours) I spent in the practice room preparing for the recital.
Whether or not you are moved by my struggles (being a little facetious here), I think that, in 2013, it is time for us to acknowledge the multiplicity of talents a classical soloist may possess, and stop trying to squeeze everyone into the same box.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
On my desk sits an enormous, overstuffed black binder labeled in large block letters “BIBLE”. This is the Grove Music style sheet that was handed to me on my first day on the job, the same one — with a few more recent amendments — assembled by Stanley Sadie and his editorial staff for the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians published in 1980. The Bible is daunting, bigger than our house style sheet by dozens of pages, and it carries with it a legacy that has defined my academic field. But in my first year and half as editor of Grove Music Online, I’ve learned to love it — with all its quirks, there is virtually no organizational, grammatical, or structural quandary it does not address. It’s very reassuring. If only the rest of my life had such a tool.
A style as specific as Grove’s lends itself well to parody, so it’s perhaps no surprise that in the first edition of New Grove, a couple of well-honed articles slipped by the sharp eyes of editor in chief Stanley Sadie : an article attributed to Robert Layton on the spurious Danish composer Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup, and an equally fictitious 16th-century Italian composer, Guglielmo Baldini. The Baldini article was actually based on a character created nearly a century earlier by German musicologist Hugo Riemann in his own music dictionary. Both articles conformed so well to Grove style that they went undetected until after the books appeared in print, at which point a furious Sadie removed them before New Grove went into a second printing.
There is a long tradition of spoof articles appearing in encyclopedias and dictionaries. There’s even a special term for such an entry: Mountweazel, named after a spoof article that appeared in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. In a 2005 article in the New Yorker, one of NCE’s editors, Richard Steins, claimed, “It was an old tradition to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright.” The idea was that if someone copied your dictionary, you could prove it by pointing to the fake. Perhaps this is true, but somehow I suspect that the tradition owes at least as much to the suppressed wit of authors and editors toiling on a genre of publication that can, at times, feel over-regulated. The fictional Lillian Mountweazel, for instance, was reportedly born in “Bangs, Ohio,” worked as a photographer specializing in images of mailboxes, and met an untimely death by explosion while on assignment with Combustibles magazine. Clearly a Mountweazel is no mere copyright-protection device.
Despite his elimination of Grove’s Mountweazels, Stanley Sadie did have a sense of humor. A year after the publication of New Grove 1, a collection of spoof articles appeared in the journal Musical Times (also edited by Sadie) laid out in perfect imitation of Grove’s style and format and, according to a brief preface, “obtained for MT from the Grove offices through an operation comparable in its scope, its daring and (we hope readers will agree) its success with the more famous Watergate.” These articles included.
It wasn’t Sadie’s lack of humor, but his dedication to Grove’s accuracy and clarity that motivated him to eliminate the spurious works. He was, perhaps, prescient about the rapidity of the spread of the printed word in the internet age. Once you publish something, you never really know where it goes. Case in point: Both Eklund-Hellerup and Guglielmo Baldini appear in Germany’s answer to Grove, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Only Eklund-Hellerup is marked as a spoof.
In honor of the co-existent traditions of accuracy and humor in the history of Grove Music, the Grove Music editorial staff would like to encourage the proliferation, not of Mountweazels per se, but of the dedication to the stylistic standards that support the content written by thousands of scholars over more than a hundred years. It is therefore my pleasure to announce the first (annual?) Grove Music Spoof Article Contest. Do you have what it takes to write a convincing Grove Music Mountweazel? Then read on.
Submission Guidelines:
Articles must be no longer than 300 words, including any bibliography or works lists you might choose to include. There is no minimum length. Entries that do not adhere to the length limit will be folded, spindled, mutilated, and rejected.
Articles will be judged by a mix of staff and outside judges including Grove Music’s Editor in Chief Deane Root, Editor Anna-Lise Santella, and a guest editor to be named later.
Judges will consider the following criteria:
Does the article adhere to Grove style?
Is it entertaining?
Could it pass for a genuine Grove article (maybe if you forgot your glasses and you were squinting at it)?
Subject must read “Grove Music fake article contest-title” (e.g., Grove Music fake article contest-Ear flute)
Body of the email must include the title of the article and your full name and contact information (street address, email, phone)
The article must be included in an attached document. It must not include your name. This is to facilitate blind judging. Use your article’s title as the document name (if your article includes punctuation that can’t be in a document title, replace the punctuation with a space). Once we receive your submission, we will send you a release form that will allow us to publish your article. You will need to sign it and return it before you can be entered into the contest.
You may send as many as three articles, but please send each submission separately. No more than three entries will be accepted from a single author.
All submissions must be received by midnight on 15 February 2013. Manuscripts received after that time will not be considered.
The winning article(s) will be announced on 1 April 2013 on the OUPblog
The winner will receive $100 in OUP books and a year’s subscription to Grove Music Online. The winning entry will be published on the OUPblog and also at Oxford Music Online where they will appear NOT as part of the dictionary, which we strive to keep accurate, but alongside the historic spoof articles on a special page.
Fine print: We reserve the right not to award a prize if we feel the submissions do not meet our criteria.
Let the games begin.
Anna-Lise Santella is the Editor of Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. She is currently waging a one-woman campaign to have the word “Mountweazel” added to the OED. When she’s not reading Grove articles, or writing about women’s orchestras — her article, “Modeling Music: Early Organizational Structures of American Women’s Orchestras” was recently published in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Spitzer (U. Chicago, 2012) — you can find her on twitter as @annalisep.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Marilyn Horne, world-renowned opera singer and recitalist, celebrated her 84th birthday on Wednesday. To acknowledge her work, not only as one of the finest singers in the world but as a mentor for young artists, I give you one of my favorite performances of hers:
Sesame Street has always been a powerful advocate for utilizing music in teaching. “C is for Cookie,” a number that really drives its message home, maintains its cultural relevance today despite being first performed by Cookie Monster more than 40 years ago. Ms. Horne’s version appeared about 20 years after the original, and is an excellent re-imagining of a classic (with great attention to detail—note the cookies sewn into her Aida regalia and covering the pyramids).
Horne’s performance shows kids that even a musician of the highest caliber can 1) be silly and 2) also like cookies—that is, it portrays her as a person with something in common with a young, broad audience. This is something that members of the classical music community often have a difficult time accomplishing; Horne achieves it here in less than three minutes.
Sesame Street produced these segments not only to expose children to distinguished music-making, but to teach them about matters like counting, spelling, working together, and respecting one another. This final clip features Itzhak Perlman, one of the world’s great violin soloists, who was left permanently disabled after having polio as a child. To demonstrate ability and disability more gracefully than this would be, I think, impossible:
American children’s music, as described in the new article on Grove Music Online[subscription required], has typically been produced through a tug of war between entertainment and educational objectives. The songs on Sesame Street succeed in both, while also showing kids something about classical music itself: it’s not just for grownups. It’s a part of life that belongs to everyone. After all, who doesn’t appreciate that the moon sometimes looks like a “C”? (Though, of course, you can’t eat that, so…)
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Portrait of Benjamin Britten by Yousuf Karsh, via Wikimedia Commons.
One of Benjamin Britten’s strengths as a composer was writing music for children. Not just music for children to enjoy — many of his works, particularly his operas, are not really kid-friendly affairs — but for them to perform. I’m thinking particularly of choral music, where he excelled at writing songs that I found both beautiful and really fun to sing when I was very young.
That’s not to say that these songs are easy, of course; much of Britten’s music was described by critics (often derogatorily) as “clever,” and can be highly challenging. But that’s one of the joys of singing it. His songs felt like puzzles we were given solve, and I remember feeling pretty clever when we finally pieced them together.
I was about 10 years old when I first saw A Ceremony of Carols, Britten’s multi-movement Christmas work for treble chorus and harp. I left that performance awestruck, especially by the song “This Little Babe,” which has, off and on, been stuck in my head ever since. In the years after that concert my sister and I hoped emphatically that our church’s choir would sing that song in an Advent service one Sunday; they did, eventually, but not at the breakneck speed we were hoping for.
“This Little Babe” is a Britten puzzle-piece. It begins with all voices singing one line in unison, then, like several other movements in A Ceremony of Carols, uses a canon-like structure. (In a canon, one part of the choir begins a melody, another part joins in after them singing the same melody, and the overlapping of the two or more parts creates harmony. This concept is deftly explained here by a frustrated Stephen Colbert to the band Grizzly Bear.)
But “This Little Babe” isn’t quite a round or a canon. It’s not like “Row, row, row your boat” where each voice sings exactly the same melody as every other. Nor are the entrances of each part spaced out in a way that makes the resulting harmony similar in every measure. The second verse splits the choir into two parts, the third verse in three, and each entrance in the split follows so quickly after the last (only a beat apart) that there’s a ripple effect; it doesn’t sound like harmony so much as like echoes in a racquetball court.
Performing this effect is difficult, and demands focus from the singers. The parts all end simultaneously despite their starting at different moments, which means that the second and third lines are shortened (and, therefore, melodically different) versions of the first line. These slight differences and the speed of the song make it imperative that the chorus members know their parts cold. At a length of about a minute and twenty seconds, however, the song doesn’t demand that the kids learn very much material, just that they learn it well.
Britten began work on the carols in 1942, during a sea voyage to England. He had been living in America for three years as a conscientious objector to WWII, but returned that spring. He’d recently been commissioned to write a concerto for harp, and brought some harp manuals to study on his way home. The boat he was traveling on made a stop in Halifax before crossing the Atlantic, and while on shore there he bought the excellently titled book The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems.
Among this book’s contents are Robert Southwell’s “New Heaven, New War” (from which the stanzas that make up “This Little Babe” were taken) and four other 14th-16th century poems used in A Ceremony of Carols. Britten completed drafts of seven of the carols in the five weeks before he landed in England while working concurrently on another choral piece. He reported to a friend that this happened simply because “one had to alleviate the boredom!” (Trying to calculate how many Ceremonies of Carols I could have written while bored on long trips myself has yielded depressing results.)
The final aspect of what makes “This Little Babe” so thrilling to perform is the words. The first verse begins:
This little Babe, so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise, the gates of hell he will surprise.
If you’re the kind of kid (as I was) that preferred the Christmas carols she sang to be in a minor key, and to invoke some scary images (“We Three Kings,” “What Child is This,” or “Coventry Carol,” for example) then getting to sing the words “Satan” and “hell” in concert is something you might relish. And it’s not just that these ideas are involved — you also get to sing about their being vanquished by a tiny baby. Being a child and singing about another child who fights and wins against evil is a glorious sensation — especially when all voices come together in unison again to sing the final line: If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.
“In Freezing Winter Night,” a foil to “This Little Babe,” is slower, and quieter, but its text, also by Southwell, is thematically similar. It addresses the paradox of God existing as a human baby with all the attendant weaknesses, like vulnerability to cold, but in “In Freezing Winter Night” the baby is first described as pitiful, his shivering portrayed in the chilly harmonies in the choir and dissonant harp tremolos.
It also utilizes a sort of canon, and in this one the top two voices do sing exactly the same line. But the harmonies shift underneath them, making the role of the D-sharp sung by the first voice-part different from the role of the D-sharp sung by the second voice part. This gives each line individual musical responsibility — a feeling that both are uniquely vital to the piece.
That is Britten’s gift to children’s choruses. He trusted them with exciting text and difficult music, and gave them the opportunity to make real art despite their age. Children can tell the difference. I’ve read that he originally intended this piece to be performed by a women’s choir, and I recently got to perform it with the women’s ensemble I’m in, but the best parts of that performance were the ones where I felt I was singing like a little kid, foiling my foes with joy.
Charles Rosen, a titan of the music world, passed away on Sunday. He was a fine concert pianist, groundbreaking musicologist, and a thoughtful critic who wrote prolifically, including regular articles for the New York Review of Books, not just on music but on its broader cultural contexts. We’re excerpting his entry in Grove Music Online by Stanley Sadie below.
Rosen, Charles (Welles)
(b New York, 5 May 1927). American pianist and writer on music. He started piano lessons at the age of four and studied at the Juilliard School of Music between the ages of seven and 11. Then, until he was 17, he was a pupil of Moriz Rosenthal and Hedwig Kanner-Rosenthal, continuing under Kanner-Rosenthal for a further eight years. He also took theory and composition lessons with Karl Weigl. He studied at Princeton University, taking the BA (1947), MA (1949) and PhD (1951), in Romance languages. Some of his time there was spent in the study of mathematics; his wide interests also embrace philosophy, art and literature generally. After Princeton he had a spell in Paris, and a brief period of teaching modern languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But in the year of his doctorate he was launched on a pianist’s career, when he made his New York début and the first complete recording of Debussy’s Etudes. Since then he has played widely in the USA and Europe. He joined the music faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1971.
As a pianist, Rosen is intense, severe and intellectual. His playing of Brahms and Schumann has been criticized for lack of expressive warmth; in music earlier and later he has won consistent praise. His performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is remarkable for its clarity, its vitality and its structural grasp; he has also recorded The Art of Fugue in performances of exceptional lucidity of texture. His Beethoven playing (he specializes in the late sonatas, particularly the Hammerklavier) is notable for its powerful rhythms and its unremitting intellectual force. In Debussy his attention is focussed rather on structural detail than on sensuous beauty. He is a distinguished interpreter of Schoenberg and Webern; he gave the première of Elliott Carter’s Concerto for piano and harpsichord (1961) and has recorded with Ralph Kirkpatrick; and he was one of the four pianists to commission Carter’s Night Fantasies (1980). He has played and recorded sonatas by Boulez, with whom he has worked closely. His piano playing came to take second place to his intellectual work during the 1990s.
Rosen’s chief contribution to the literature of music is The Classical Style. His discussion, while taking account of recent analytical approaches, is devoted not merely to the analysis of individual works but to the understanding of the style of an entire era. Rosen is relatively unconcerned with the music of lesser composers as he holds ‘to the old-fashioned position that it is in terms of their [Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven’s] achievements that the musical vernacular can best be defined’. Rosen then establishes a context for the music of the Classical masters; he examines the music of each in the genres in which he excelled, in terms of compositional approach and particularly the relationship of form, language and style: this is informed by a good knowledge of contemporary theoretical literature, the styles surrounding that of the Classical era, many penetrating insights into the music itself and a deep understanding of the process of composition, also manifest in his study Sonata Forms (1980). The Classical Style won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1972. His smaller monograph on Schoenberg concentrates on establishing the composer’s place in musical and intellectual history and on his music of the period around World War I. Rosen’s interest in the thought and composition processes of the Romantics, also strong, is shown in his Harvard lectures published as The Romantic Generation. He has written many shorter articles, and contributes on a wide range of topics to the New York Review of Books.
Writings
The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London and New York, 1971, enlarged 3/1997 with sound disc)
Arnold Schoenberg (New York, 1975/R)
‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 87–100
Sonata Forms (New York, 1980, 2/1988)
‘The Romantic Pedal’, The Book of the Piano, ed. D. Gill (Oxford, 1981), 106–13
The Musical Languages of Elliot Carter (Washington DC, 1984)
with H. Zerner: Romanticism and Realism: the Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York, 1984) [rev. articles pubd in The New York Review of Books]
‘Brahms the Subversive’, Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. G.S. Bozarth (Oxford,1990), 105–22
‘The First Movement of Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat minor, op.35’, 19CM, xiv (1990–91), 60–66
‘Ritmi de tre battute in Schubert’s Sonata in C minor’, Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard G. Ratner, ed. W. Allanbrook, J. Levy and W. Mahrt (Stuyvesant, NY,1992), 113–21
‘Variations sur le principe de la carrure’, Analyse musicale, no.29 (1992), 96–106
Plaisir de jouer, plaisir de penser (Paris, 1993) [collection of interviews]
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (New York, 1994)
The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, MA, 1995) [based on the Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard; incl. sound disc]
Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
Critical Entertainment: Music Old and New (Cambridge, MA, 2000) [collection of essays]
Charles Rosen
May 5, 1927 – December 9, 2012
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
By long tradition, sweet Venus and mystical Neptune are the planets astrologically connected with music. The relevance of Mars, “the bringer of war” as one famous composition has it, would seem to be pretty oblique. Mars in the horoscope has to do with action, ego, how we separate ourselves off from the world; it is “the fighting principle for the Sun,” in the words of famous astrologer Liz Greene. Michel Gauquelin, who conducted a statistical test for the validity of astrology, found that Mars near the ascendant or midheaven in a person’s chart correlated heavily with choosing athletics or surgery as a career: it connects to physical competition and knives. Mars also rules everything military, and thus in music it is associated mainly with percussion. Most composers have egos, but musicians are not generally a physically aggressive bunch, and fighting isn’t our area. Many a famous composer sat out World War II playing in the Army band. (In high school I was thrilled that my simply taking music classes exempted me from the gym requirement — under the institutional assumption that all music students would get enough exercise in the marching band. I was a pianist.)
Claudio Monteverdi
And so Mars, in the classical music world, has been only an occasional acquaintance. There isn’t much classical music about athletics, though Arthur Honegger did write a rather punchy tone poem called Rugby (1928), and Charles Ives — a star baseball player in youth — portrayed a Yale-Princeton Football Game in music around 1899 as a kind of college prank. Music specifically about surgery may have yet to appear (and let’s leave Salomé out of this). Seeking a connection between Mars and music, Gustav Holst would probably leap to most minds, but I think first of Claudio Monteverdi. Holst, after all, had to give all his planets equal treatment, but it was Monteverdi who invented the “stile concitato,” the agitated style, to restore in music what he saw as a warlike mode known in poetry but historically absent in music. He made his theories explicit in his scenic cantata Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda of 1624, its poem a kind of forced sexual encounter disguised as a battle between armed rivals. Monteverdi makes it quite clear what he considered warlike tones: lots of quick repeated notes in a harmonic stasis. And if you think about it, that description applies equally well to “Mars” from Holst’s Planets (1914–16), with its hammering, one-note ostinato, and, as we’ll see below, to most other battle pieces as well. Considering the phenomenal evolution of the actual military, its musical signifiers have remained strikingly consistent.
Despite Monteverdi’s continued advocacy in some subsequent Madrigali guerrieri of 1638, the stile concitato did not establish itself as a broad genre. In the centuries following Il combattimento, depiction of martial action is rare enough in music for the well-known instances to be easily enumerated. The first of Johann Kuhnau’s Biblical History sonatas (1700) purports to describe David’s conflict with Goliath, once again with a profusion of quick repeated notes; also with “martial” rhythms such as streams of dotted eighths followed by sixteenths, or the snare-drum rhythm of an eighth and two sixteenths. The Battalia a 9 (1673) of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber is for only strings, but it too makes a fetish of chords in repeated notes. Its “Der Mars” movement, in addition, brilliantly asks for a piece of paper between the fingerboard and strings of the cello to make the instrument’s rhythmic drone sound plausibly like some kind of drum. Michel Corrette’s Combat Naval from his Harpsichord Divertimento No. 2 (1779) likewise starts off with repeated notes in snare-drum rhythms, and climaxes with forearm clusters that quite effectively signify cannon blasts. In Mozart’s and Haydn’s generations, even the presence of drums and cymbals was enough to suggest Turkish and thus military connotations (since what were the Turks there for, except to make war with?), as in Haydn’s “Military” Symphony, No. 100.
The advent of Romanticism, though, marked a turn at which war became demoted as a subject for serious musical treatment. Two of the 19th century’s most high-profile musical depictions — Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (1813) and Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht (1857) — are considered among their most embarrassingly literal and superficial works. Bruckner did claim that the Plutonian finale of his Eighth Symphony (1887) depicted two emperors meeting on the field of battle, but that was rather after the fact, since he was trying to throw his lot in among the programmaticists. All this suggests, I think, distinct unease among classical musicians with things military or violent. Of course military music is sometimes appropriated to good effect, as in Berlioz’s Rakoczy March from The Damnation of Faust (1846). But despite Monteverdi’s heroic attempt to establish a martial mode, in retrospect classical attempts to depict battle tend to become anomalous oddities from history (Corrette, Biber) or humorous superficialities (Beethoven, Liszt).
Carl Nielsen
Finally, in the 20th century, the increase in dissonance and percussion brought at least a more respectable realism to battle music, though the carnage of the World Wars made anti-war statements more popular than celebrations of famous victories. Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony (1922) was a powerful response to the lunacy of World War I, with a first movement in which a solo snare drum seems determined to halt the progress of the orchestra, whose humanistic main theme finally overwhelms it. A couple of conflagrations later, Stravinsky made an anti-war statement in his Symphony in Three Movements (1945), partly inspired by film images of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. Less ironically, George Antheil cheered the Allies along with his Fifth Symphony, subtitled “1942” and written that year as the fortunes of war were changing in North Africa. Shostakovich, in his Leningrad Symphony (1941), wrote melodies to symbolize the mutual approaches of the German and Russian armies, though the German theme is arguably a rather silly one; at least, Béla Bartók took savage delight in satirizing it in his Concerto for Orchestra. During the war even the more abstract-leaning Stefan Wolpe wrote a Battle Piece (1943-7) for piano — once again marked by repeated notes.
The massive War Requiem (1961-2) by the pacifist Benjamin Britten, however — perhaps its century’s grandest anti-war musical protest, filled with snare-drum march rhythms and trumpet fanfares suspended in uneasy irony — seems to close a curved trajectory that opened with Monteverdi’s Il combattimento. Whereas musicians once thought the military mode in music could be innocently brought up with historical interest or patriotic pride, today we invoke it only to condemn it. The Vietnam War era may have rendered any non-pejorative expression of Mars verboten for the foreseeable future. In recent years the pianist Sarah Cahill commissioned anti-war pieces from many composers (Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Meredith Monk among them) for a project called “A Sweeter Music”; my own contribution, War Is Just a Racket, uses a 1933 text by General Smedley Butler, lamenting the army’s too-close ties to corporate interests.
Yet perhaps because Mars and Neptune were conjunct when I was born, I’ve written one un-ironic piece of battle music myself. Aside from the “Mars” movement of my own Planets (yes, I was foolhardy enough to compete with Holst, but my “Mars” is more complaining than belligerent), I depicted the battle of the Little Bighorn in my one-man electronic cantata Custer and Sitting Bull (1999), replete with sampled gunfire. The Sioux warriors are in one key, the US Cavalry in another a tritone away, and as they take turns the music jumps between two different tempos. But there’s something so peculiar about the expression of Mars in music that I have to wonder if, a couple of centuries from now, that battle scene will survive only as a curious anomaly, like Battalia a 9 or the Combat Naval or the battle of David and Goliath.
Kyle Gann is a composer who writes books about American music, including, so far; The Music of Conlon Nancarrow; American Music in the Twentieth Century; Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice; No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”; Robert Ashley; and, coming up in 2015, a book on Ives’s Concord Sonata. His music explores tempo complexity and microtonality. He writes the blog, Postclassic and teaches at Bard College.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Oxford University Press’ annual Place of the Year, celebrating geographically interesting and inspiring places, coincides with its publication of Atlas of the World – the only atlas published annually — now in its 19th Edition. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price. Read previous blog posts in our Place of the Year series.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles the OUPblog via email or RSS.
It’s difficult to pin a label on John Zorn. Active since the early 70s, Zorn has effectively woven his peculiar style of musical experimentation into the fabric of New York City’s downtown scene. His work — in the general sense of the word — has varied from philanthropic to shocking, with a curatorial bent that has often held quite a bit of sway.
Where to start? I could talk about Zorn’s music venue, The Stone, which pays for itself through CD sales and other contributions, so that “100% of the nightly revenue” goes directly to the performing musicians.
Or I could talk about his Obsessions Collective, a “non-profit alternative to the commercial Arts scene,” which boasts zero overhead so that, like with The Stone, every cent derived from sales goes directly to the artists.
Or maybe I should tell you about Zorn’s record label, Tzadik, which releases the work of contemporary composers “who find it difficult or impossible to release their music through more conventional channels.”
But perhaps I should first tell you about his “radical Jewish music” projects, which found initial voice when Zorn curated the Art Projekt Festival in Munich in 1992, and resulted in what has since been considered a sort of radical Jewish music manifesto (written by Zorn and guitarist Marc Ribot).
What I really don’t want to do is try to “describe” the MacArthur Fellow’s music to you — because, to be honest, it’s almost impossible. Sometimes it’s noise, sometimes it’s atonal, sometimes it’s klezmer, sometime it’s jazz. It’s always pushing the boundaries of what you think it will be.
In honor of Zorn’s 59th birthday (which took place over the weekend), why don’t we just enjoy this clip from 1991, featuring Zorn’s group Naked City performing at the Vienna Jazz Festival? Be warned, this might fall in the “shocking” category for you! (Zorn is the one the camouflage trousers and that’s Mike Patton from Faith No More on vocals.)
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles the OUPblog via email or RSS.
0 Comments on John Zorn at 59 as of 9/4/2012 5:01:00 AM
Scott Huntington: Describe the process of writing the music for 
A style as specific as Grove’s lends itself well to parody, so it’s perhaps no surprise that in the first edition of New Grove, a couple of well-honed articles slipped by the sharp eyes of editor in chief 
