Choral Music in Nineteenth-century America


Book Description

Choral music represented an important part of American cultural life during the nineteenth century, whether integral to worship or merely for entertainment. Despite this history, choral music remains one of the more neglected studies in the scholarly community. In an effort to fill this gap, N. Lee Orr and W. Dan Hardin offer a new approach to the study of choral music by mapping out and bringing bibliographical control to this expansive and challenging field of study. Their unique guide focuses on literature related to choral music in the United States from the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century through the earlier part of the twentieth century. Choral Music in Nineteenth-Century America explores the entire range of choral music conceived, written, published, rehearsed, and performed by an ensemble of singers gathered specifically to present the music before an audience or congregation. The guide expertly sifts through the extensive literature to cite the most notable sources for study and provides individual chapters on the leading nineteenth-century composers who were instrumental in the development of choral music.




Dry Manhattan


Book Description

In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.




Nineteenth-century Piano Music


Book Description

Focusing on the core composers of the 19th century, this text provides an overview of the repertoire & keyboard technique of the era. This new edition includes a chapter on women composers, in particular Fanny Hensel & Clara Schumann.




Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook


Book Description

Ole Hendricks was an immigrant both representative and exceptional—a true artistic talent who nevertheless lived a familiar immigrant experience. By day, he was a farmer. But at night, his fiddle lit up dance halls, bringing together all manner of neighbors in rural Minnesota. Each tune in his repertoire of waltzes, reels, polkas, quadrilles, and more were copied neatly into his commonplace book. Such tunebooks, popular during the nineteenth century, rarely survive and are often overlooked by folk scholars in favor of commercially produced recordings, published sheet music, or oral tradition. Based on extensive historical and genealogical research, Amy Shaw presents a grounded picture of a musician, his family, and his community in the Upper Midwest, revealing much about music and dance in the area. This notable contribution to regional music and folklore includes more than one hundred of Ole's dance tunes, transcribed into modern musical notation for the first time. Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook will be valuable to readers and scholars interested in ethnomusicology and the Norwegian American immigrant experience.




The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry


Book Description

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.




Gems of Exquisite Beauty


Book Description

In the antebellum period, most Americans first encountered European classical music through hundreds of hymn tunes that tapped into classical melodies. This book is the first in-depth study of the rise and fall of these popular, but largely overlooked, adaptations and their place in nineteenth-century American musical life.




Sounds of the Metropolis


Book Description

The phrase "popular music revolution" may instantly bring to mind such twentieth-century musical movements as jazz and rock 'n' roll. In Sounds of the Metropolis, however, Derek Scott argues that the first popular music revolution actually occurred in the nineteenth century, illustrating how a distinct group of popular styles first began to assert their independence and values. He explains the popular music revolution as driven by social changes and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise, which ultimately resulted in a polarization between musical entertainment (or "commercial" music) and "serious" art. He focuses on the key genres and styles that precipitated musical change at that time, and that continued to have an impact upon popular music in the next century. By the end of the nineteenth century, popular music could no longer be viewed as watered down or more easily assimilated art music; it had its own characteristic techniques, forms, and devices. As Scott shows, "popular" refers here, for the first time, not only to the music's reception, but also to the presence of these specific features of style. The shift in meaning of "popular" provided critics with tools to condemn music that bore the signs of the popular-which they regarded as fashionable and facile, rather than progressive and serious. A fresh and persuasive consideration of the genesis of popular music on its own terms, Sounds of the Metropolis breaks new ground in the study of music, cultural sociology, and history.







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.




The second practice of nineteenth-century tonality


Book Description

In 1861, a half-century before Arnold Schoenberg's break with tonality, a young composer associated with Liszt saw a threshold to musical modernism as lodged in the "suspension of the main key." As the unified tonal perspective of earlier music yielded increasingly to dualistic key structures often laden with chromaticism, the language of music was transformed. In The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, nine prominent theorists and historians explore aspects of this musical evolution, from Schubert to the end of the nineteenth century. Many works discussed are masterpieces of the performance repertory, ranging from Chopin's piano pieces and Wagner's music dramas to the symphonies of Bruckner. The integration of analytical and historical approaches in the essays seeks to avoid narrow specialization as well as the polemic stance of some recent studies. A critical assessment of issues including inter-textuality, narrative, and dramatic symbolism enriches this investigation of what may be described as the "second practice" of nineteenth-century tonality.