Interpreting the Musical Past : Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France


Book Description

This study of the French early music revival gives us a vivid sense of how music's cultural meanings were contested in the nineteenth century. It surveys the main patterns of revivalist activity while also providing in-depth studies of repertories stretching from Adam de la Halle to Rameau.




Nineteenth-century Choral Music


Book Description

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is a collection of essays studying choral music making as a cultural phenomenon, one that had an impact on multiple parts of society. Rather than merely offering a collection of raw descriptions of works, the contributors focus their discussions on what these pieces reveal about their composers as craftsmen/women. Major works as well as other equally rich parts of the repertoire are discussed, including smaller choral works and contributions by composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn, Amy Beach, Charles Stanford,




The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger


Book Description

Nadia Boulanger - composer, critic, impresario and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century - was also a performer of international repute. Her concerts and recordings with her vocal ensemble introduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to unfamiliar historical works and new compositions. This book considers how gender shaped the possibilities that marked Boulanger's performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s to origins in the classroom and the salon. Brooks investigates Boulanger's promotion of structurally motivated performance styles, showing how her ideas on performance of historical repertory and new music relate to her teaching of music analysis and music history. The book explores the way in which Boulanger's musical practice relied upon her understanding of the historically transcendent masterwork, in which musical form and meaning are ideally joined, and shows how her ideas relate to broader currents in French aesthetics and culture.




The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music


Book Description

First published in 2005, this title provides extensive knowledge on seventeenth-century music.




French Musical Life


Book Description

Explicitly or not, the historical musicology of post-Revolutionary France has focused on Paris as a proxy for the rest of the country. This distorting lens is the legacy of political and cultural struggle during the long nineteenth century, indicating a French Revolution unresolved both then and now. In light of the capital's power as the seat of a centralizing French state (which provincials found 'colonizing') and as a cosmopolitan musical crossroads of nineteenth-century Europe, the struggles inherent in creating sustainable musical cultures outside Paris, and in composing local and regionalist music, are ripe for analysis. Replacement of 'France' with Paris has encouraged normative history-writing articulated by the capital's opera and concert life. Regional practices have been ignored, disparaged or treated piecemeal. This book is a study of French musical centralization and its discontents during the period leading up to and beyond the "provincial awakening" of the Belle Époque. The book explains how different kinds of artistic decentralization and regionalism were hard won (or not) across a politically turbulent century from the 1830s to World War II. In doing so it redraws the historical map of musical power relations in mainland France. Based on work in over 70 archives, chapters on conservatoires, concert life, stage music, folk music and composition reveal how tensions of State and locality played out differently depending on the structures and funding mechanisms in place, the musical priorities of different communities, and the presence or absence of galvanizing musicians. Progressively, the book shifts from musical contexts to musical content, exploring the pressure point of folk music and its translation into "local color" for officials who perpetually feared national division. Control over composition on the one hand, and the emotional intensity of folk-based musical experience on the other, emerges as a matter of consistent official praxis. In terms of "French music" and its compositional styles, what results is a surprising new historiography of French neoclassicism, bound into and growing out of a study of diversity and its limits in daily musical life.




The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music


Book Description

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the cutting-edge work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. In this volume, noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music fosters and reflects a sustained dialogue about their shared goals and techniques, rejuvenating their work with new insights into the field itself.




The Cambridge History of Musical Performance


Book Description

The intricacies and challenges of musical performance have recently attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. Research into the performer's experience has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as many other professional issues. Historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Reflecting the strong ongoing interest in the role of performers and performance, this History brings together research from leading scholars and historians and, importantly, features contributions from accomplished performers, whose practical experiences give the volume a unique vitality. Moving the focus away from the composers and onto the musicians responsible for bringing the music to life, this History presents a fresh, integrated and innovative perspective on performance history and practice, from the earliest times to today.




Grétry's Operas and the French Public


Book Description

Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.




Songs, Scribes, and Society


Book Description

Songs, Scribes, and Society explores the cultural and musical importance of five 15th-century Chansonniers - personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated songbooks - from the Loire Valley of France. Author Jane Alden treats the Chansonniers as physical artifacts to reveal their cultural context and its relationship to their commission, creation, and use.




Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle


Book Description

In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, contributors from musicology, literary studies, history, and art history provide an account of the works of 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle, one of the first named authors of medieval vernacular music for whom a complete works manuscript survives. The essays illuminate Adam’s generic transformations in polyphony, drama, debate poetry, and other genres, while also emphasizing his place in a large community of trouvères active in the bustling urban environment of Arras. Exploring issues of authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the material contexts of his works, and his influence on later generations, this book provides the most complete and up-to-date picture available in English of Adam’s œuvre. Contributors are Alain Corbellari, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, John Haines, Anne Ibos-Augé, Daniel E. O’Sullivan, Judith A. Peraino, Isabelle Ragnard, Jennifer Saltzstein, Alison Stones, Carol Symes, and Eliza Zingesser.