Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa (1935–2024), who served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years and led the Vienna State Opera for eight years, was celebrated for his dynamic and limpid style on the podium and his distinctive mop of hair, reminiscent of Beethoven’s famous portrait. In 2010, during his hiatus following a major cancer surgery, Ozawa had a series of recorded conversations with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who transcribed and compiled their conversations into the book Absolutely on music.
In light of Ozawa’s death earlier this year, Absolutely on music remains the only published literature that substantially captures Ozawa’s own words and memories. The English title of the book is somewhat misleading. Although the book contains extensive discussions about music—mostly German classical music, which was Ozawa’s favorite—the conversations delve into much more, illuminating Ozawa’s life stories and personality.
At just 25 years old, Ozawa began his career as an assistant conductor under Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, where he quickly demonstrated both talent and dedication. Ozawa recalled his audition with Bernstein in Berlin:
“After a concert, we all piled into cabs and went to this sort of strange bar called Rififi where we drank and did the interview. They used the bar’s piano and did a kind of test of my ear…. My English was terrible at the time, so I could hardly understand what anybody was saying, but somehow I managed to pass [laughter] and become an assistant.”
Seiji Ozawa conducting. (Photo: Donald Jones)
Shown out-and-out favoritism by Bernstein, Ozawa made his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in early 1961. Unlike other assistants, Ozawa was given opportunities to conduct the premiere of Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Bacchanale alongside other major works, including the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird, during the orchestra’s tour of the U.S. and Japan. Ozawa remembered Bernstein introducing him to the audience saying, “Here’s a young conductor. I’d love to have you listen to him perform.”
Ozawa did not earn this favoritism by mere good fortune. Earning $150 a week, Ozawa lived with his wife in a small apartment near Broadway. During the sweltering summers, without air conditioning, they spent nights in the cheapest all-night movie theater, where they would get up every two hours as each movie ended, waiting in the lobby before the next one began. But Ozawa had no time for side jobs. He dedicated every spare minute to studying each week’s music, while living backstage at the concert hall. He was the hardest worker among his cohort, often covering for the other two assistants when they had side gigs. Essentially doing the work of three, Ozawa studied scores until he had memorized them. “You have to prepare every last detail,” said Ozawa. And luck, as they say, was what happened when preparation met opportunity.
Ozawa maintained such rigorousness throughout his career. In Boston, he dedicated his early morning–as early as four o’clock–to score reading before rehearsing with the orchestra at ten. In Vienna, where Ozawa did not have a piano at home, he went to the conductor’s room in the opera house and sounded the score on piano until all hours of the night–just as he had done in New York 40 years earlier. Ozawa was a disciplined musician, but he also had a mischievous side when he put down (or occasionally borrowed) the baton. In the mid-1960s, aside from his tenure in Toronto, Ozawa was often invited by Eugene Ormandy to guest conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. As Ozawa recalled,
“Eugene Ormandy was a tremendously kind man…. He once gave me a baton of his, and it was terrific, a special-order item, very easy to use. I had so little money in those days, I couldn’t afford a custom-made baton. One day I opened his desk drawer and found a whole row of them. I figured he wouldn’t miss a few batons if they were gone for a while and helped myself to three. But I got caught right away. [Laughter.] He had this scary woman for a personal secretary. She probably made a habit of counting the batons in his drawer and she grilled me. “You took them, didn’t you?” “Yes, I’m sorry, I took them.”
Murakami: How many batons were there in the drawer?
Ozawa: I don’t know, maybe ten.
Murakami: Well of course they caught you if you took three out of ten!
In 1963, Ozawa was appointed as the music director of the Ravinia Festival in the Chicago area. A rising star, he soon made his television debut on CBS’s game show What’s my line?
Ozawa on the game show What’s my line? in 1963.
Absolutely on music came out as an intermezzo anticipating Ozawa’s ongoing musical career, though illness ultimately curtailed his public activities in the following decade. For readers discovering the book after Ozawa’s death, this intermezzo becomes an echo of his finale. Reading it during my daily subway commute to Manhattan, I could literally hear the rumble of the train that Ozawa had grumbled about while recalling a live recording at Carnegie Hall. I was on the R train, passing right underneath the venue. For an instant, my ear connected with Ozawa’s, reactivating a strand of his memory from 1977.
Memory is such a powerful human ability. It freezes a snippet of time and preserves it like amber, shareable through storytelling and, in that way, multiplies and remains alive. In the book’s afterword, Ozawa wrote, “Once I started remembering, I couldn’t stop, and the memories came back with a nostalgic surge . . . Thanks to Haruki, I was able to recall Maestro Karajan, Lenny, Carnegie Hall, the Manhattan Center, one after another, and I spent the next three or four days steeped in those memories.” Reading these memories, we thus keep them alive, through which we commemorate their owner, Seiji Ozawa.
–Written by Stella Zhizhi Li, Associate Editor, RILM
Read more in Absolutely on music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa by Murakami Haruki (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2016-23727). Besides the English translation, find the Japanese original and translations of the book in 11 languages in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
DEUMM Online digitizes, enhances, and extends the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language. Comprising a broad range of entries (persons, topics, dances, genres, geographical locations, institutions, instruments, and works), DEUMM Online uses advanced and intuitive search and translation functionalities. This venerable music encyclopedia, which has set the standards in modern Italian music lexicography, is, in its new online format, once again an indispensable node in a comprehensive, international, networked research experience.
For those unable to join the Rome event in person, the event will be live streamed on YouTube by Fondazione Roma Tre Teatro Palladium, accessible directly from the following QR code:
The program (below) will include Daniele Trucco’s DEUMM-inspired music, greetings from Luca Aversano (President, ADUIM), Marcoemilio Camera (President, IAML Italia), and Tina Frühauf (Executive Director, RILM), as well as presentations by Zdravko Blažeković (Executive Editor, RILM), Stefano Campagnolo (Director, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma), Alex Braga (composer), and DEUMM Online’s general editors Antonio Baldassarre and Daniela Castaldo. Pianist Giuseppe Magagnino will also perform works by Ellington, Beethoven, The Beatles, and more.
And mark your calendars: DEUMM Online will be featured again at the following events:
19 November 2024: Turin, hosted by Istituto per i Beni Musicali di Piemonte at the Teatro Regio
21 November 2024: Milan, hosted by the Archivio Storico Ricordi in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense
Luigi Russolo’s contributions to art and music extend beyond his well-known manifesto, L’arte dei rumori (The art of noises). While he has been celebrated for his theoretical and practical advancements in noise music, his role as a painter and his impact on futurist art are equally significant. As one of the signatories of the futurist painting manifesto (1910), Russolo was deeply involved in the early development of futurism, an artistic and social movement that celebrated modernity, technology, and the dynamism of contemporary life. His painting Treno in velocità (Speeding train), a pivotal work that reflects the futurist fascination with speed and technological progress, exemplifies this enthusiasm for capturing movement and modern machinery.
House+Light+Sky (1913)
In his paintings from this period, Russolo explored the themes of motion, not just through the depiction of machines like trains and automobiles, but also by capturing the energy of crowds of protesters and other dynamic urban scenes. This exploration extended well beyond visual art into the realm of sound, culminating in his manifesto on noise, where he argued for a broader appreciation of the everyday sounds of industrial and urban life.
Synthèse plastique des mouvements d’une femme (Plastic synthesis of a woman’s movements, 1912)
Russolo’s invention of the intonarumori (noise instruments) was a direct extension of his artistic principles. These instruments were designed to produce a variety of noises, challenging conventional notions of musicality and embracing the sounds of the modern world. His compositions for these instruments anticipated future developments in experimental music and had a lasting influence on composers like George Antheil, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage. Russolo’s work represented an innovative fusion of visual art and sound, reflecting the futurist ideals of embracing the new and the dynamic. His influence extended into music and remains a testament to his innovative spirit in both the visual and auditory domains.
This according to “Pasajes sonoros [y ruidistas] de la ciudad futurista” by Juan Agustín Mancebo Roca (Ausart aldizkaria: Arte ikerkuntzarako aldizkaria/Journal for research in art/Revista para la investigación en arte 9/1 [2021] 127–142; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-16831). Also find the entry on Luigi Russolo in A dictionary of the avant-gardes (2001). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
The image at the beginning of this post is Russolo’s Dinamismo di un’ automobile (Dynamism of a car, 1913).
Below, the musician Mike Patton and Luciano Chessa test out reconstructed futurist noise machines based on intonarumori for an exhibit.
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The Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos is considered one of the foremost Latin American composers of the 20th century. He was deeply interested in Brazil’s folk music traditions and was instrumental in setting up the country’s music education system, emphasizing native songs. His interest in Brazilian folk music resulted from visiting with different communities and listening to their music during his travels to various regions of Brazil as a young cellist. While living in Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos began playing guitar and performing with popular musicians around the city. His mother disapproved of the company he kept, and as a result, he left home to pursue an itinerant life traveling around Brazil while supporting himself by playing cello and guitar. He also continued to learn about the folk music of the areas he visited.
Villa-Lobos later distinguished himself as a conductor, bringing several modern works to the attention of his audiences and consistently composing. His output of over 2,000 works includes everything from chamber music to the larger forms. His lack of formal academic training, far from hampering his development, compelled him to create a truly distinct and original technique.
Villa-Lobos’s prolific output includes the Bachianas brasileiras suites, a group of pieces based on original melodies patterned after the folk songs and Brazilian Indigenous tribal chants treated in a Bach-like fashion on Latin American instruments. The aria is arranged in an AABA form, with the first and last sections performed by a soloist and the repeated first section by the wind instruments followed by the chant:
“Lo, at midnight clouds slowly pass by, rosy and lustrous,
O’er the spacious heaven with loveliness laden,
From the boundless deep the moon arises wondrous,
Glorifying the evening like a beautiful maiden.
Now she adorns herself in half unconscious duty,
Eager, anxious that we recognize her beauty,
While sky and earth, yes, all nature with applause salute her,
All the birds have ceased their sad and mournful complaining:
Now appears on the sea in a silver reflection, Moonlight softly waking
The soul and constraining hearts to cruel tears and bitter dejection.”
Read the entry on Heitor Villa-Lobos in Band music notes (1979). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
Below is a performance of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras, no. 5 by the Spanish cellist Antonio Martín Acevedo and the Argentinian guitarist Marisa Gómez.
Amidst a summer break flying by all too quickly, RILM presents another installment of its Instant Classics series—posts comprising annotated bibliographies of books, indexed in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, that have received the most reviews in academic literature across a given time span. The content of these books exemplifies RILM’s commitment to disseminating publications that are truly international in scope, with coverage that embraces a diversity of languages, nations, subject matter, and approaches to music research. This 2022—23 list contains a little something for everyone, and we hope it will inspire some welcomed additions to your summer reading list.
As always, this collection should be approached with a critical eye. As reviews continue to be written, the order of the books included here will continuously be in flux and, over time, some could be replaced by others. Further, access to resources, familiarity with conventions of proposal writing that are attractive to publishers, and innumerable other factors vary considerably across music research communities around the world. Indeed, closing the gap in such disparities, particularly regarding publications coming from the Global South, is an essential component of RILM’s mission. Despite the inherent limitations, collecting these texts in this way is valuable, as it generates an archive of the topics, methodologies, and perspectives that earned the attention of music scholars, writers, and journalists during a brief period in time. We can appreciate these texts’ contributions to musical knowledge while simultaneously being aware of the powers held and challenges faced by the publishing firms and university presses that sell them. As we zoom out, patterns may emerge that provide insight into the topical trends that have contributed to music discourse in the early decades of the 21st century.
And finally, do keep in mind that RILM can only disseminate the writings on music to which it has access. You are invited to help make RILM Abstracts be as complete as it can be by visiting our submissions page, making sure records of your publications appear there, and adding abstracts and reviews to them as necessary. We thank you in advance and wish you a happy summer of reading!
P.S.: Sympathies to Arnold Schoenberg, the book on whom, either predictably, eerily, coincidentally, or uncannily, placed at number 13, the one number he avoided more than any other while he was alive.
– Written, compiled, and edited by Michael Lupo, Assistant Editor/Marketing & Media, RILM
________________________________
#13. Sachs, Harvey. Schoenberg: Why he matters (New York: Liveright, 2023). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-4761]
Abstract: In his time, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. Within the context of this interpretative account, Schoenberg’s reputation is restored to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the 20th century’s most influential composers and teachers. Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the antisemitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.
#12. Broad, Leah. Quartet: How four women changed the musical world (London: Faber & Faber, 2023). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-1400]
Abstract: A group biography of four women composers who changed the modern musical landscape: Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), famous for her operas, was a trailblazing queer Victorian composer and a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller, and committed Suffragette. Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) was a talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty, and one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. Dorothy Howell (1898–1982) was a prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms. She earned a reputation as the “English Strauss”, and after retiring she tended Elgar’s grave alone. Doreen Carwithen (1922–2003) was one of Britain’s first woman film composers, who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film; her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century’s most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten.
#11. Proksch, Bryan. The golden age of American bands: A document history (1835–1935) (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-10133]
Abstract: The story of the American wind band, told chronologically by those who experienced it in real time from 1835 to 1935. The volume explores how bands became bands, how they rose in popularity, and which figures had insights and specific impacts on the development of the genre. Through source documents and articles, the volume surveys the ensemble’s history from the time of the first brass bands in the 1830s, through the Civil War and the golden ages of Patrick S. Gilmore and John Philip Sousa, to the cusp of the wind ensemble just before World War II. Musicians such as Frederick Fennell, Allessandro Liberati, Karl L. King, Patrick Conway, Fredrick Neil Innes, Jules Levy, Alan Dodworth, and Herbert L. Clarke are included. Numerous rare and unknown illustrations show the places where band history happened. Documents include rare periodical excerpts, handwritten letters, and other writings taken from archives throughout the United States.
#10. Bonnette-Bailey, Lakeyta Moninque and Adolphus G. Belk, Jr., eds. For the culture: Hip-hop and the fight for social justice. Music and social justice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-4800]
Abstract: Documents and analyzes the ways in which hip hop music, artists, scholars, and activists have discussed, promoted, and supported social justice challenges worldwide. Drawing from diverse approaches and methods, the contributors in this volume demonstrate that rap music can positively influence political behavior and fight to change social injustices, and then zoom in on artists whose work has accomplished these ends. The volume explores topics including education and pedagogy; the Black Lives Matter movement; the politics of crime, punishment, and mass incarceration; electoral politics; gender and sexuality; and the global struggle for social justice. Ultimately, the book argues that hip hop is much more than a musical genre or cultural form: hip hop is a resistance mechanism.
#9. Vera Aguilera, Alejandro and David Andrés Fernández. Los cantorales de la Catedral de Lima: Estudio, reconstrucción, catálogo (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-1557]
Resumen: Los cantorales de la Catedral de Lima estudia, por primera vez, la colección de libros de coro de la Catedral Metropolitana de Lima, que está formada por cuarenta volúmenes manuscritos copiados en su mayor parte en el siglo XVII. En el estudio inicial, se aborda su historia, confección y escribas responsables. Seguidamente, se indaga sobre su forma de interpretación en la época colonial a través de la reconstrucción de un servicio litúrgico de suma importancia en su contexto. Finalmente, se ofrece un catálogo crítico de la colección que incluye sus contenidos íntegros en forma de índices analíticos y alfabéticos que facilitan su localización. En suma, este trabajo constituye un estudio integral sobre una colección de libros de canto llano conservada en Sudamérica. Además, representa una útil herramienta de investigación en la que se exhuman numerosos documentos históricos y se presentan transcripciones de repertorio tanto monódico como polifónico, razón por la que será de interés para musicólogos, historiadores e intérpretes, entre otros.
Abstract: Studies, for the first time, the collection of choir books of the Catedral Metropolitana de Lima, which consists of 40 manuscript volumes copied mostly in the 17th century. The history, physical features, and scribes who worked on the manuscripts are discussed. The way this collection was used in colonial times is examined through the reconstruction of a liturgical service from its context. An annotated catalogue of the collection is offered, which includes its complete contents in the form of analytical and alphabetical indexes that facilitate its location.
#8. Marissen, Michael. Bach against modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-3999]
Abstract: Many scholars and music lovers hold that Bach is a modern figure, as his music seems to speak directly to the aesthetic, spiritual, or emotional concerns of today’s listeners. But, by 18th-century standards, Bach and his music in fact reflected and forcefully promoted a premodern world and life view. A new look at Bach is presented that considers problems of inattentiveness to historical considerations in academic and popular writing about Bach’s relation to the present. Also put forward are interpretive reassessments of key individual works by Bach, examining problems in modern comprehension of the partly archaic German texts that Bach set to music. Lastly, Bach’s music is explored in relation to premodern versus enlightened attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, and the theological character of Bach’s secular instrumental music is examined. Overlooked or misunderstood evidence is provided of Bach’s private engagement with religious and social issues that he also addressed in his public vocal compositions. While we are free to make use of Bach and his music in whatever ways we find fitting, we ought also to guard against miscasting Bach in our own ideological image and proclaiming the authenticity of that image, and therefore its prestige value, in support of our own agendas.
#7. Goodman, Karen D., ed. Developing issues in world music therapy education and training: A plurality of views (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 2023). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-7332]
Abstract: Reflects on current or necessary changes in music therapy training that come about because of history, society, economy, generational shifts, and the workplace. The subject matter questions the nature of music therapy itself; examines challenges to education and training; suggests critical thinking (vs. repetition or repackaging of information) for students, educators, clinicians, researchers and supervisors in the field of music therapy; respects the past but looks to the future; and offers perspectives from others in the field through such vehicles as surveys, interviews, and reviews of literature.
#6. Mathew, Nicholas. The Haydn economy: Music, aesthetics, and commerce in the late eighteenth century. New material histories of music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-10831]
Abstract: Reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. Critical questions are addressed, such as how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late 18th-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined. The study weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.
#5. Dylan, Bob. The philosophy of modern song (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-9712]
Abstract: Comprises over 60 essays written by the Pulitzer Prize winning songwriter, focusing on songs by other artists spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. Among many other subjects, the trap of easy rhymes is analyzed, breaking down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, while also explaining how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. Over 100 photos are included, as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem—characteristic of the author’s own work in the field of songwriting—adding to the work’s transcendence.
#4. Denk, Jeremy. Every good boy does fine: A love story, in music lessons (New York: Random House, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-954]
Abstract: Pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At 16 he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur genius, and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall. But under all this struggle is a love letter to the act of teaching. Denk dives deeply into the pieces and composers that have shaped him—Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, among others—and offers lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. How do melodies work? Why is harmony such a mystery to most people? Why are teachers so obsessed with the metronome? Denk shares the most meaningful lessons of his life, and tries to repay a debt to his teachers. He also reminds us that we must never stop asking questions about music and its purposes: consolation, an armor against disillusionment, pure pleasure, a diversion, a refuge, and a vehicle for empathy.
#3. Cypess, Rebecca. Women and musical salons in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-4905]
Abstract: A broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. The author presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianne von Martínez in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, the author uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in 18th-century salons. The book explores women’s agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of 18th-century musical life.
#2. Vela González, Marta. La jota, aragonesa y cosmopolita: De San Petersburgo a Nueva York (Zaragoza: Pregunta, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-14921]
Resumen: En este libro, la pianista, escritora y docente Marta Vela nos lleva tras los pasos de renombrados compositores (Liszt, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Satie?) que, a lo largo del siglo XIX, visitaron España, descubrieron la jota aragonesa y, fascinados, la integraron en sus obras, desde óperas hasta sinfonías, pasando por ballets y música de salón. Un libro lleno de curiosidades, erudición, anécdotas y hallazgos inéditos, narrado de forma amena y precisa.
Abstract: In this book, the pianist, writer, and teacher Marta Vela takes us in the footsteps of renowned composers (Liszt, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Satie?) who, throughout the 19th century, visited Spain, discovered the Aragonese jota and, fascinated, integrated it into their works, from operas to symphonies, including ballets and salon music. A book full of curiosities, erudition, anecdotes, and unpublished discoveries, narrated in a pleasant and precise way.
#1. Simon, Andrew. Media of the masses: Cassette culture in modern Egypt. Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-3929]
Abstract: Investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and circulation of content, cassette players and tapes soon informed broader cultural, political, and economic developments and defined modern Egyptian households. Drawing on a wide array of audio, visual, and textual sources that exist outside the Egyptian national archives, it provides a new entry point into understanding everyday life and culture. Cassettes and cassette players did not simply join other 20th century mass media, like records and radio; they were the media of the masses. Comprised of little more than magnetic reels in plastic cases, cassettes empowered cultural consumers to become cultural producers long before the advent of the Internet. Positioned at the productive crossroads of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, it ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.
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Isang Yun’s youth was dominated by his involvement with resistance movements against the Japanese occupation of Korea, which began in 1910. His political activities deeply affected his development as a musician, which was characterized by the constant conflict between his artistic interests and the political commitment that he felt was necessary. Nevertheless, at the age of 17, Yun traveled to Japan, despite his father’s warning, to embark on a college education focused on the study of Western music. After two years, he returned to Korea to continue his studies and his involvement in the Korean liberation struggle. Yun was arrested by Japanese occupation forces in 1943, and it was not until 1948 that he returned to music, this time as a music teacher at an all-girls high school in his hometown. He later began lecturing at a university in Seoul where he received several awards for his compositions.
These awards enabled Yun to continue studying music in Europe at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik (Berlin University of Music). His frequent participation in Darmstadt’s summer courses for new music led to his acceptance by the European avant-garde, within which he remained an outsider, albeit a respected one. Yun settled in Berlin in 1964 as a Ford Foundation scholarship recipient but the political conflict in his now divided homeland was never far from his thoughts. He was especially critical of South Korea’s leadership and refused several invitations to perform there. Yun hoped for the reunification of Korea, and to make this happen, he made a daring visit communist North Korea in 1963.
The brazen visit concerned South Korean officials, who had Yun kidnapped from Berlin in 1967 in a spectacular operation by the South Korean secret service. He was charged with treason and sent to prison where he endured torture, attempted suicide, and was forced to confess to espionage. After a trial, Yun was sentenced to life imprisonment, a charge that was later revised after massive protests internationally. Subsequently, Yun left Korea in 1969 and returned to Berlin and later became a German citizen. From 1970 onward, he worked as a professor and taught composition while lecturing on various occasions throughout Europe and North America. In 1972, Yun composed the piece Sim Tjong based on a popular Korean fairytale specially for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. When asked in a 1987 interview whether he was consciously trying to combine Asian and Western elements in his music, Yun replied,
“No, that would be too artificial. The inner truth is, in actuality, a music of the cosmos. Realistically seen, I’ve had two experiences, and I know the practice of both Asian music and European. I am equally at home in both fields. I’m a man living today, and within me is the Asia of the past combined with the Europe of today. My purpose is not an artificial connection, but I’m naturally convinced of the unity of these two elements. For that reason, it’s impossible to categorize my music as either European or Asian.”
Celebrate Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month by reading the entry on Isang Yun (also spelled Yoon) in MGG Online. Listen to Yun’s composition Muak dance fantasy below.
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From 1972 to 1974, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho studied at the University of Industrial Art and Design in Helsinki. Although she had played violin since childhood, she initially did not pursue her interests in music and composition because she saw no professional prospects in music as a woman. By 1976, however, Saariaho had enrolled at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki where she studied with Paavo Heininen until 1981. After completing a degree in composition, she continued her studies at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg (Freiburg University of Music), where she studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber before moving to Paris in 1982.
Saariahobegan her career with short compositions using serial techniques. Generally, her music was considered rather avant-garde for Finland in the 1980s, a period when she was began composing with computers and other digital technology. After moving to Paris, Saariaho further developed her techniques for computer-assisted composition in the music studios of IRCAM (Institut de recherche musicale et coordination acoustic et musique) and GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales). Throughout the 1980s, her compositions (particularly her electroacoustic compositions) increasingly gained international recognition, and some were performed in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
Besides her training in serial composition techniques, Saariaho’s musical thinking was deeply influenced by the performing arts and above all, by the color theory of Goethe and Wassily Kandinsky. They inspired her to experiment with the transition between vowels and consonants and to generate transition processes between sound and the human voice. In a 2014 interview, she discussed her use of the human voice as an instrument and a vehicle for text, including poetry and literature. According to Saariaho,
“I have such an affinity for the human voice–and a personal predilection for texts! In a sense, it’s the richest form of expression because the instrument is inside a human being and there are many things that cannot be falsified when using your voice. Whether or not a work for voice originates from a text, it’s necessarily a different mode of communication than instrumental music. Of course, using a text adds another layer of richness and meaning. I really love using voice, but it was difficult for me to write for it at first, probably because the historical context was difficult. I’ve always loved Berio, for instance, and what he did with voice, but I don’t like music that imitates Berio–and at some point, it felt as though you could only write for voice in that way, you had to write that way. So, it took time for me to find a certain freedom and my own way of writing for voice–and to accept it.”
Read the full entry on Kaija Saariaho in MGG Online.
Below is Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984), a piece commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Company that sees her experimenting with electroacoustic music by manipulating pre-recorded sounds on a tape to create eerie textures.
The Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier’s (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) work on the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, France (pictured below) has been touted as iconic of the international style. Built between 1950 and 1955, the chapel has a tower reminiscent of a grain silo, a sweeping roof that resembles a floppy hat and curved walls with rectangular apertures of various shapes and sizes. These characteristics all reflect Le Corbusier’s taste for articulated light and reinforced concrete, as well as his distinct penchant for sparse and ascetic design. Due to one wall of the chapel being set several feet inside the edge of the roof, it is possible to be both under the roof and open to the elements. Le Corbusier used the east wall of the chapel as a cyclorama against which the public and private altars were set, incorporating a swiveling statue of the Virgin Mary to accommodate both. The building’s architecture also reminds of Le Corbusier’s past as a Cubist painter and that he continued to produce two-dimensional visual art throughout his career.
Le Corbusier also is well-known for his work on Edgard Varése’s Poéme électronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The work was performed in an elaborate installation of sound routes which circled the performance space in a building designed by Iannis Xenakis. Le Corbusier designed a spectacle of colored lights and images to accompany Varèse’s piece, which was a self-sufficient musical work, part of a larger composition of architecture, sound, light, and image. Unpublished correspondence between Varèse and Le Corbusier suggests that they originally intended to conceptually coordinate sound and image. At the very least, Le Corbusier’s script influenced the form and sound material of Varèse’s piece.
Learn more in the entry on Le Corbusier in A dictionary of the avant-gardes (2001). Find it in RILM Music Encylopedias.
Below is a performance of Varése’s Poéme électronique by the Tufts University Electronic Music Ensemble, followed by a video featuring a walk-through of Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp.
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At its premiere 100 years ago, on 12 February 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue was received with a standing ovation after it was performed. At the time, the conductor Paul Whitehead requested that Gershwin write a “jazz concerto” for an event to be held at the Aeolian Hall, a renowned Manhattan concert venue located in the Aeolian Building–coincidentally, this building was also RILM’s original home before the CUNY Graduate Center. Given the centennial of Rhapsody’s premiere in 2024, it is likely to be heard in many different settings and contexts.
Since the piece premiered in early 1924, however, debates have arisen about how much Gershwin knew about writing music. Because his musical language was an unconventional blend of U.S. popular music and European art music, some of his critics assumed that he knew little about writing serious music. This premise has been confirmed somewhat by statements made in early Gershwin biographies, which alleged that he was self-taught.
The inherent complexity of Rhapsody in blue and other subsequent concert works written by Gershwin, however, suggest he knew a great deal about writing music. It is also known that Gershwin received training from the versatile composer and musician Charles Hambitzer as early as 1912, where he discovered the music of Irving Berlin and J.D. Kern, and later received special theory lessons from the composer and conductor Edward Kilenyi. Rhapsody was composed in only five weeks, in spare moments while Gershwin was otherwise occupied with the premiere of a Broadway show. On that time schedule, he had no alternative other than to put what he already knew about writing music into that work.
Celebrate the centennial of the premiere of Rhapsody in blue today by reading the entry on George Gershwin in MGG Online and “Rhapsody in blue: A culmination of George Gershwin’s early musical education”, a dissertation by Susan E. Neimoyer (2003, University of Washington, Seattle); find it in RILM Abstracts.
Below is the classic scene of the Rhapsody in blue premiere in the 1945 Gershwin biopic starring Robert Alda.
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Gloria Coates was born in 1933 in Wausau, Wisconsin and later studied composition with Alexander Tcherepnin and Otto Luening, as well as singing, musicology, acting, and painting, receiving degrees from Columbia University and Louisiana State University. Coates initially worked as a composer, singer, actress, author, and painter. In 1969, she settled in Munich and focused on composing. This period of her life yielded 17 symphonies and ten string quartets, as well as other instrumental chamber music, vocal works, and electroacoustic music. In 2014, the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed referred to Coates as “our last maverick”.
Coates used microtonality, scordatura, and glissandi on string instruments, and experimented with multiphonic vocal techniques, yet without ever entirely abandoning tonality. In a 2010 interview, she described her distinct approach to composition and use of glissandi. As Coates described, “I would say that my initial work with glissandi had to do with the fact that I’m also a visual artist. I’ve never really analyzed it, but, in a way, I was building structures visually that could also exist in sound. I think that’s how it all began.”
The premiere of her first symphony Music on Open Strings at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1978 brought her international fame. The symphony was included in the Bayerischer Rundfunk’s 1980 Musica Viva concert series, becoming the first orchestral composition by a woman in the 35-year history of the series. Coates became involved in Munich’s musical life by directing a series on U.S. contemporary music there from 1971 to 1984. Invitations to concerts and lectures in the early 1980s took her to Moscow (1981), India (1982), and Harvard University (1984).
Coates, who shared her time between the United States and Germany, died in Munich on 19 August 2023. Read the full obituary on MGG Online.
Listen to Gloria Coates’ composition Time advances to no destiny (performed by Lavinia Mallegni) below.
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