Category Archives: Musicology

New titles for RILM Abstracts with Full Text in 2025

RILM Abstracts with Full Text will add eight more titles to its full-text journal collection this summer. The new titles are:

Българско музикознание [B”lgarsko muzikoznanie/Bulgarian musicology]. Sofiâ: B”lgarskata Akademiâ na Naukite, Institut za Izkustvoznanie, 1977–. ISSN 0204-823X

The only academic periodical dedicated to music and musicology in Bulgaria, this journal was established in 1977 as a musicological series and has been published quarterly since 1981. It features scholarly articles that explore phenomena and developments across both Bulgarian and international musical cultures.

Canadian winds/Vents canadiens: Journal of the Canadian Band Association/Revue de l’Association canadienne des harmonies. Toronto: Canadian Band Association/Association Canadienne de l’Harmonie, 2002–. ISSN 1703-5295

The professional journal of the Canadian Band Association, this publication was first issued in the fall of 2002. It features a broad range of articles related to wind band activity, interpreted in an inclusive and expansive manner. Striving to balance scholarly inquiry with pedagogical relevance, the journal is designed to be accessible to all instrumental music educators. While its primary audience is Canadian and many articles address issues specific to the Canadian context, the journal maintains an outward-looking perspective, aiming to foster dialogue and engagement with the international wind band community.

Fontes artis musicae. Madison: A-R Editions, 1954–. ISSN 0015-6191

The journal publishes articles aligned with the aims of IAML, with a particular focus on international music librarianship, documentation, bibliography, audiovisual materials, and musicology.

関渡音樂學刊 [Guandu yinyue xuekan]/Kuandu music journal. Taibei: Guoli Taibei Yishu Daxue/Taipei National University of the Arts, 2004–. ISSN 1814-1889

Named after Guandu, the area of Taipei where the university is located, the journal has been in publication since 2004, and is published by the School of Music at Guoli Taibei Yishu Daxue (Taipei National University of the Arts, TNUA). It features scholarly articles on a range of topics, including musicology, ethnomusicology, compositional techniques, music theory, and music psychology.

Journal of Christian musicology. Ilé-Ifẹ̀: Obafemi Awolowo University, 2020–. ISSN 2782-8433

Published annually by the Christian Music Research Forum in collaboration with the Christian Music Institute and Research Centre–an academic NGO based in Nigeria–this journal responds to the growing need for a systematic study of Christian music in all its diversity and distinctiveness. It advances global scholarship and practice in Christian music by publishing research on its various forms, disseminating theoretical perspectives across genres, and promoting the performance and application of Christian repertoire in a range of social and cultural contexts.

– Liuteria, musica e cultura: Organo ufficiale dell’Associazione liutaria italiana. – Cremona: Associazione Liuteria Italiana, 2006–. ISSN 1825-7054

The official publication of the Associazione Liutaria Italiana (Italian Violinmaking Association), this journal supports the Association’s mission to promote and preserve the culture of violin making. It welcomes contributions from scholars whose research interests intersect with the field of violin making, as well as the broader domains of organology and musical scholarship. Membership in the Association is open to individuals engaged in these areas of study.

– Studi musicali. Firenze: Leo S. Oschki, 1972–2009. ISSN 0391-7789 and eISSN 2037-6413

The official publication of the long-established Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, dedicated to the field of music culture. While the journal leans toward historical musicological studies–particularly those related to Rome–it also encompasses a range of other disciplines, including music criticism, sociology, ethnomusicology, and analysis. Given its international circulation, the journal accepts submissions in widely used scholarly languages within the cultural and academic spheres.

– Studien zur Musikwissenschaft: Beihefte der Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Wien: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2017–. ISSN 0930-9578

Founded in 1913 by Guido Adler, this journal features studies closely related to the volumes of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ), along with methodological reflections on musical philology, articles on the history of music in Austria, and editions of relevant textual sources.

These additions exemplify RILM’s commitment to providing full-text content that is truly international in scope, with coverage that embraces a diversity of languages, nations, subject matter, and approaches to music research. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text is a comprehensive bibliography of writings on music, featuring citations, abstracts, and indexes. It covers over one million publications from the early 19th century to the present on traditional music, popular music, jazz, classical music, and related subjects, enhanced with full text.

If you do not already subscribe to RILM Abstracts with Full Text, please reach out to your EBSCO sales representative, or email information@ebsco.com.

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Filed under Ethnomusicology, Musicology, New periodicals, RILM, RILM news

Solfeggio’s rebirth

The study of 18th century music pedagogy in the Neapolitan region of Italy has seen a significant surge in interest within musicological research in recent years. This research has explored sources related to the practice of partimento since the late 20th century, and over time, has expanded to include materials on counterpoint and solfeggio. Solfeggio evolved throughout the 20th century into an exercise focused almost exclusively on musical reading–first spoken, then sung. A landmark modern and systematic study of the instructional duo between the 16th and 17th centuries is Andrea Bornstein‘s comprehensive monograph, followed by Robert O. Gjerdingen‘s works. Gjerdingen identifies a compositional framework within 18th century exercises, which he refers to as “schemata” and finds within the partimenti. His research demonstrates that both partimento and solfeggio, centered on the close relationship between bass and melody, can be considered foundational exercises for musician training since the 18th century.

Subsequent studies by scholars such as Paolo Sullo explored the role of solfeggio within the composition schools of various Neapolitan masters, carefully reconstructing and analyzing the production context and repertoire spanning from the era of Leonardo Leo to that of Nicola Zingarelli. The work of Nicholas Baragwanath, particularly his influential monograph The solfeggio tradition (2020), has sparked a revival of interest in 18th century solfeggio, reaching an expanding audience of musicologists and musicians. Baragwanath’s study highlights the deep connection between solfeggio and the practice of solmization on the hexachord, a practice that, in Italy, persisted until the 19th century. He identifies the enduring presence of this practice as being largely due to the central role of the Catholic Church, which continued to base the teaching of musical rudiments on hexachordal plainchant and the associated solmization system.

Leonardo Leo

For Baragwanath, the gradual abandonment of hexachordal solmization in favor of the French method of reading real sounds–where each note corresponds to a single syllable–marks a key factor in the gradual decline of the Italian bel canto tradition. In this context, hexachordal solmization emerges not only as a performance technique, which Baragwanath carefully reconstructs and applies to 18th century solfeggi, but also as an interpretative lens through which to understand the solfeggi themselves.

This according to a new article on solfeggio by Paolo Sullo in DEUMM Online.

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Filed under Baroque era, Classic era, Music education, Musicology, Renaissance

A resource for international women composers

International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on Saturday, 8 March, highlights the remarkable achievements of women and reinforces the ongoing pursuit of gender equality. To honor this day, Bibliolore features a reference text from RILM Music Encyclopedias, International Encyclopedia of Women Composers by Aaron I. Cohen, which celebrates the extraordinary contributions of women in music. Let its inspiring content guide you in embracing this year’s International Women’s Day theme, “accelerate action”, a rallying cry for equal rights, power, and opportunities for all. At the heart of this vision lies the empowerment of the next generation—particularly young women and adolescent girls—as driving forces for meaningful and lasting change. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a progressive document used as a blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide that transformed the women’s rights agenda in terms of legal protection, access to services, youth engagement, and change in social norms and stereotypes.

A retired town planner and self-proclaimed “research buff” from Johannesburg, South Africa, Aaron I. Cohen (b.1906) made history in 1981 by publishing the first encyclopedia dedicated to women composers. The second edition of this groundbreaking work, expanded into two volumes, includes 6,200 entries and 14 appendices. Cohen’s remarkable research journey began with a four-year expedition across Europe, during which he gathered materials on women composers. He also established a global network of antiquarians who provided him with essential references. Recognizing the linguistic diversity of the sources, he eventually put together a small team capable of translating texts from at least 15 different languages.

Cohen’s encyclopedia is remarkable for its breadth, highlighting the earliest known woman composer, Hemre (2723 B.C.E.), an Egyptian leader of court music, and spans a vast geographical scope, featuring nearly 300 composers from Asia to Central America. To this day, the International encyclopedia of women composers remains the only comprehensive resource that covers virtually every known woman composer. It provides biographical details, lists of compositions and publications, as well as a bibliography. This edition also includes a discography and a list of recording companies, making it an invaluable reference for understanding the contributions of women in music.

To learn more, visit RILM Music Encyclopedias and browse through its encyclopedias devoted to a wide range of music and subjects.

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Filed under Musicology, Performers, Resources, RILM, Women's studies

Jose Maceda reimagines time

The Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer Jose Maceda created unique works that blended his fieldwork on Filipino and other music with his expertise in European avant-garde traditions. His compositions combined innovative techniques such as spatialization, a focus on timbre, and musique concrète with Asian instruments, rhythms, and structures. Maceda was particularly drawn to a flexible approach to time, famously commenting during a flight from New Zealand to the Philippines that a recording of a Chopin Berceuse was “so stiff that I wanted to jump out of the plane!”

In a 1975 paper presented at the Third Asian Composers’ League Conference and Festival in Manila, Maceda proposed a new concept of Asian musical time, inspired by natural phenomena like bird migration and plant flowering, rather than clocks, time signatures, or barlines. In 1971, he composed Cassettes 100, a performance featuring a hundred performers with portable cassette players in the lobby of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The piece incorporated recordings of Indigenous instruments, natural sounds, and choreographed movements. As Maceda explained, “The recordings are my dictionary. They are a receptacle of ideas from which I can pull at any time.”

Maceda’s Cassettes 100 was re-staged in Singapore as part of the 2019 exhibition Suddenly turning visible: Art and architecture in Southeast Asia (1969–1989).

After graduating from the Academy of Music in Manila in 1935, Maceda continued his studies in piano with Nadja Boulanger and Alfred Cortot in Paris. He also pursued musicology at Columbia University and Queens College in New York, anthropology at Northwestern University, and ethnomusicology at Indiana University in Bloomington, as well as at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his doctorate. Between 1940 and 1957, Maceda performed as a pianist in France, and during the same period, he also worked as a conductor in both the United States and the Philippines. He conducted works by composers such as Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, and others, including pieces from China and the Philippines. In 1958, Maceda worked as a researcher at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris, where he met influential figures such as Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis.

Maceda served as a professor of piano and ethnomusicology at the University of the Philippines from 1952 to 1990. He became renowned for his extensive fieldwork, which spanned diverse settings, including urban areas, remote mountain villages, and island communities across the Philippines. Maceda’s research also took him to musician communities in Sarawak (Malaysia), Thailand, Kalimantan (Indonesia), Africa, Brazil, and Australia, with his findings published in numerous international journals. His work focused on documenting Southeast and East Asian musical practices and folk traditions, particularly prehistorical Indigenous music. Maceda’s field recordings, which encompass 51 language groups and include music, instruments, photographs, text transcriptions, and translations, are archived at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. From 1997 to 2004, Maceda served as the executive director of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music Research at the university.

The floorplan for Maceda’s Pagsamba, performed by 241 musicians at the Parish of Holy Sacrifice in Quezon City, Philippines (1968). Image courtesy of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology.

He received numerous prestigious scholarships and awards throughout his career, recognizing his contributions to music and ethnomusicology. He was awarded research scholarships for his work in Africa and Brazil by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1968. Maceda also received the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in France (1978), the Outstanding Research Award from the University of the Philippines (1985), the John D. Rockefeller Award from the Asian Cultural Council in New York (1987), and the Fondazione Civitella Ranieri Award in Italy (1997). In 2000, he was honored as a Filipino National Artist for Music by the Philippine government. Additionally, three of his albums–Gongs and bamboo (2001), Drone and melody (2007), and Ugnayan (2009)–were released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.

This according to the entry on Jose Maceda in MGG Online.

Listen to excerpts of Ugnayan and Pagsamba below.

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Asia, Ethnomusicology, Musicology, Nature, Performers, Sound, World music

Neapolitan song and identity

With the unification of Italy, Naples lost its status as the capital, and following the devastating 1884 cholera epidemic, authorities launched a massive urban reorganization project similar to that of Paris. This overhaul largely obliterated the port districts, known as the “belly of Naples“, a dense network of alleys, warehouses, and narrow streets, which had been alive with cultural events, processions, collective rituals, and performances by storytellers, street actors, and barkers. The city’s historic urban fabric was replaced by modern, fast-flowing roads primarily designed for commercial purposes, marking what became known as the gutting of Naples—although, it also represented a redevelopment of the city. This transformation ushered in a dramatic shift in the city’s identity, turning it into a modern urban organism while leaving behind the image of the old, vibrant Bourbon capital. The changes also reshaped social dynamics, fostering the rise of a small bourgeoisie that, with a few exceptions, wholeheartedly embraced the national cause and capitalist development, which manifested in the realms of journalism, theater, painting, literature, and art song.

The poet Salvatore Di Giacomo was the driving force behind the emergence of the new Neapolitan art song. His poetry, set to music by composers such as Enrico De Leva, Mario Pasquale Costa, and Francesco Paolo Tosti, signaled a decisive break from previous traditions. This collaboration between respected scholars and accomplished composers established the foundation for what would come to be known as the “Neapolitan song”, marking the beginning of a new era in the genre.

Salvatore Di Giacomo

While Di Giacomo and his collaborators pioneered a new approach to song, the form of the song itself was evolving. It adopted a structure characterized by a verse-and-refrain format, and over time, this structure became more refined and simplified compared to Di Giacomo’s earlier, more elaborate courtly compositions. The new Neapolitan song emerged as a distinct form, better aligned with modern entertainment standards, and in an era of a burgeoning popular culture, this new song form proved to be a more versatile and adaptable genre, suitable for various settings, yet still preserving the lyrical and musical qualities that had defined earlier forms.

Neapolitan song was a key element in a broader, successful effort to redefine the image of a city that, after the unification of Italy, needed to forge a new identity. However, the city was burdened by long-standing issues, including a largely illiterate population with unstable employment. This population had swelled over the centuries due to the unique relationship between the urban elite and the rural peasantry in the Kingdom of Naples. A significant portion of this population consisted of common people, possessing a cohesive and resilient culture deeply rooted in pre-Christian, magical, and irrational traditions. This cultural foundation both influenced and clashed with the emerging new Neapolitan identity.

This according to the article of the week by Giovanni Vacca in DEUMM Online.

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Filed under Europe, Geography, Musicology, Space

Chopin’s unknown waltz

New York’s Morgan Library & Museum recently discovered an autograph by Frédéric Chopin containing 24 bars of a previously unknown waltz. The small-format sheet measuring 130 by 102 millimeters had come into the museum’s possession in 2019 as part of the autograph collection of August Sherrill Whiton Jr., director of the New York School of Interior Design. Experts consulted by the curator Robinson McClellan confirmed the authenticity of the iron gall ink on paper manuscript, which resembles that of Chopin’s early Parisian years (ca. 1830–1835).

The Chopin signature at the upper edge of the leaf is not an autograph, but all other elements reflect the composer’s graphic peculiarities, such as the characteristic shape of the bass clef. Stylistically, the miniature, entitled Valse, displays all of Chopin’s hallmarks. Divided into eight bars of prelude and postlude each, the waltz theme first leads to the dominant, then back to the tonic via the parallel major, melodically and harmonically in keeping with Chopin’s style. However, there are some notable irregularities. The outburst of the eight-bar introduction leading from piano to forte-fortissimo in the shortest time has no direct equivalent in Chopin’s other waltzes; its dynamic range and brash intensity are more akin to the dramatic qualities found in his scherzos.

Read the full post “Chopin discovery at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York” in MGG Online.

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Filed under Classic era, Musicology, Notation

Seiji Ozawa: An assiduous giant, a spirited man

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.

Read related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2015/09/01/ozawa-arrives/

https://bibliolore.org/2016/05/14/the-boston-symphony-orchestra-archives/

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Musicology, Performers

RILM Launches DEUMM Online

RILM cordially invites you to join us for the release of DEUMM Online on Wednesday, 30 October 2024, at 7:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST. Co-sponsored by the Associazione fra i Docenti Universitari Italiani di Musica (ADUIM) and IAML-Italia, the event will take place in the Teatro Palladium auditorium in Rome, Italy.

Teatro Palladium, Ph. © Francesco Ciccone

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

Hear more about DEUMM Online and download the DEUMM Online brochure and logo.

DEUMM Online trailer (Italian)

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Africa, Analysis, Antiquity, Asia, Australia and Pacific islands, Baroque era, Black studies, Central America, Classic era, Dance, Dramatic arts, Ethnomusicology, Europe, Film music, Geography, Iconography, Iconography, Instruments, Jazz and blues, Literature, Mass media, Middle Ages, Musicologists, Musicology, North America, Opera, Opera, Politics, Popular music, Religion, Religious music, Renaissance, RILM news, Romantic era, Sound, South America, Visual art, West Indies, World music

Brahms and Chrysander

With the assistance of the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, the State and University Library of Hamburg (SUB) has acquired 44 handwritten letters and postcards from Johannes Brahms to Friedrich Chrysander, 33 of which were previously unknown. The documents were in the possession of descendants of Chrysander, who was a pioneering musicologist and Handel researcher, and deal with, among other topics, the collaboration between him and Brahms on the complete edition of Handel’s works. The Brahms archive within the SUB is one of the four largest Brahms collections in the world.

In addition, the SUB acquired, again with support from the Cultural Foundation, a manuscript score with the choruses from Handel’s oratorio Messiah in a previously unknown German translation. The Messiah was premiered in English in Dublin in 1742; performances with German-language texts only took place in Germany from the 1770s onwards. These spectacular documents of music history were purchased at auctions in London, Handel’s long-time place of work, and have now been transported to Hamburg, the birthplace of Johannes Brahms.

This according to MGG Online.

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Filed under Musicology, Romantic era

Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras

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.

Related posts in Bibliolore:
Villa-Lobos’s choro no. 10

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Musicology, Performers, Popular music, South America