Launched in 2015 by the Università di Catania, Bollettino di studi belliniani is the digital journal of the Centro di documentazione per gli Studi Belliniani and the Fondazione Bellini.
The inaugural issue includes studies of the reception of Bellini’s operas in 19th-century London, contextual discussions of aspects of Norma and La sonnambula, and a prospectus for a critical edition of the composer’s correspondence.
Below, Maria Callas sings Casta diva from Norma.
Comments Off on Bollettino di studi belliniani
Filed under New periodicals, Opera, Romantic era
The renowned Hindustani śahnāī player Bismillah Khan lived in Varanasi for all of his adult life, and never wanted to leave the city even for a day—for example, complicated negotiations were required to persuade him to travel to Eluru to receive a prestigious award.
An American patron once invited him to come and live in California, but he replied that he could not bring himself to leave his beloved house. When the patron offered to build him an identical house and create a similar neighborhood, Khan asked him whether he could also bring the Ganges River!
This according to “The legend that was Bismillah Khan” by Pappu Venugopala Rao (Sruti 264 [September 2006] pp. 20–21).
Today would have been Bismillah Khan’s 100th birthday! Below, a live performance; can anyone help us to date it?
Comments Off on Bismillah Khan and Varanasi
Filed under Asia, Performers
Free improvisation, which arose among jazz musicians but now encompasses a broad range of musical interactions, is best understood as a forum for exploring interactive strategies.
The practice emphasizes process, an engendered sense of discovery, dialogical interaction, the sensual aspects of performance, and a participatory aesthetic; its inherent transience and immediacy challenge dominant modes of consumption and sociopolitical and spiritual models of the efficacy of art.
This according to “Negotiating freedom: Values and practices in contemporary improvised music” by David Borgo (Black music research journal XXII/ [fall 2002] pp. 165–188).
Above and below, Ornette Coleman’s group in the early 1960s.
Comments Off on The challenge of free improvisation
Filed under Jazz and blues, Performance practice
In 2015 Reichenberger launched the series Iberian early music studies with New perspectives on early music in Spain, edited by Tess Knighton and Emilio Ros-Fábregas.
The volume brings together research by scholars—both well established and of younger generations, both Spanish and from all over the world—that offers new perspectives on many aspects of early musical culture on the Peninsula, whether regarding the Ars Nova or the Counter-Reformation, music historiography or analysis, early improvisation techniques or imitatio in Renaissance polyphony, or questions of performance practice or ambassadorial musical networks, making an important contribution to establishing and sustaining a valuable discourse with the broader European context.
Below, a selection from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, the subject of one of the articles in the inaugural issue.
Comments Off on Iberian early music studies
Filed under Middle Ages, New series, Renaissance
In the eiri-kyōgenbon (illustrated editions of kabuki plot synopses) of the Genroku reign (1688–1704), evidence is found for the representation of exotic animals on the kabuki stage: tigers and elephants, regarded as Chinese animals, in plays of the Edo tradition, as fierce opponents of the protagonist; and peacocks in the Kamigata (Kyōto-Ōsaka) style, in kaichō scenes (the unveiling of a Buddhist image).
It is not clear whether stuffed prop animals were always used or if actors portrayed the animals; it seems certain that real animals were not used.
This according to “元禄歌舞伎に登場する動物” (Animals in Genroku kabuki) by 鎌倉 恵子 (Kamakura Keiko), an article included in Kabuki: Changes and prospects—International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (Tōkyō: Tōkyō Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkyūjo/National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, 1998, pp. 135–47).
Above, Bandō Mitsugorō I as a samurai subduing a tiger; below, a modern-day kabuki dragon.
Comments Off on Kabuki animals
Filed under Animals, Asia, Dance, Dramatic arts
Carl Ruggles’s œuvre, although small, is powerful, finely crafted, and intensely individual; his compositions are not easily mistaken for those of any other composer. An individuality so audibly recognizable points to distinctive musical characteristics and procedures.
A pervasive theme in Ruggles’s music is the tension between consistent compositional procedures and the composer’s determination not to use them systematically. This consistent inconstancy is integral both to Ruggles’s compositional method and to his aesthetic.
This according to A vast simplicity: The music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen P. Slottow (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2009).
Today is Ruggles’s 140th birthday! Above, a 1934 portrait by his friend Thomas Hart Benton; below, Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Cleveland Orchestra in his celebrated Sun-treader.
Comments Off on Carl Ruggles’s consistent inconstancy
Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music
Indie pop has had a complicated relationship with mass culture—it simultaneously depends upon and deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth, and it is especially adept at generating personal authenticity.
It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood as an aesthetic and not a synonym for bad. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors.
The honesty of indie pop does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.
This according to “‘…This little ukulele tells the truth’: Indie pop and kitsch authenticity” by Emily I. Dolan (Popular music XXIX/3 [October 2010] pp. 457-469).
Below, Stephin Merritt, whose music and career serve as a case study in the article.
Comments Off on Indie pop and kitsch
Filed under Humor, Performers, Popular music
In an interview, the Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked why, when he could get any lyricist to write for him, he chooses to work with his wife, Polly Samson.
“When you’ve got such a good lyricist so close by, I could not feel the point in going elsewhere” he replied.
“Polly and I are on a working partnership as well as a life partnership and she’s as good as I can get. Other lyricists would be writing more for themselves than for me and they would not know me that well. If I asked Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan to write for me, I love their work but I don’t know these people. So it seems to me more artistically sound to work with someone who I live and breathe with every day.”
Quoted in “Q&A: David Gilmour” by Emmanuel Legrand (Billboard CXVIII/8 [25 February 2006] p. 31).
Today is Gilmour’s 70th birthday! Below, On an island, one of many songs that Gilmour has co-written with Samson.
Comments Off on David Gilmour and Polly Samson
Filed under Performers, Popular music
Translingual discourse in ethnomusicology is a new peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal aiming at encouraging discourse across language barriers by publishing English translations of ethnomusicological papers that have originally appeared in other languages and therefore probably not received their due recognition.
Papers are selected from proposals made by our Editorial Board and undergo a double-open peer-review process. The English translations are usually accompanied by the original version and are freely available (open access) in both HTML and PDF format.
This journal is jointly published by the musicology department at Universität Wien and the ethnomusicology department at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz, and is sponsored by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung.
Below, the Dubrovnik-area linđo, the subject of one of the articles in the inaugural issue.
Filed under Ethnomusicology, New periodicals
Valuable conclusions can be reached on the aesthetic and moral perceptions of Dimitri Mitropoulos from the study of his commercial and private recordings and his concert programs.
Mitropoulos was a unique interpreter who combined respect for significant works of historical Western music with the fight to project characteristic examples of the musical language of the 20th century. Far from the dictates of popular and easy recognitions, he gave us his own, often idiosyncratic, point of view of a morally honest and aesthetically valuable interpretation.
This according to “Ο Δ. Μητρόπουλος και το ήθος της ερμηνείας” [Dimitri Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance] by Stathīs A. Arfanīs and Giōrgos Maniatīs, an essay included in Δημήτρης Μητρόπουλος (1896-1960): πενήντα χρόνια μετά [Dimitris Mitropoulos (1896–1960): Fifty years later] (Athīna: Orpheus Edition, 2012).
Today is Mitropoulos’s 120th birthday! Below, rehearsing and performing with the New York Philharmonic.
Comments Off on Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance
Filed under Performers
featured – Bibliolore