Bibliolore now has 100 followers! Many thanks to all who have helped the RILM blog to get the word out on timely and interesting publications about music. Kool & the Gang have something to say about that:
Webern-Studien
In 2012 Verlag Lafite, a division of Musikzeit, launched the series Webern-Studien with Wechselnde Erscheinung: Sechs Perspektiven auf Anton Weberns sechste Bagatelle, edited by Simon Obert.
The series will serve as a supplement to Musikzeit’s edition of the composer’s complete works, providing relevant correspondence, journal entries, and so on, in addition to detailed analyses of the works themselves.
Below, the Tesla Quartet performs all six of Webern’s bagatelles.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, New series
Franz Eckert in Japan
In the late 19th century the new Japanese government chose European models for economic and political systems; it also chose European music as its official standard.
European musicians were brought to Japan, and in 1879 Franz Eckert (above) arrived in response to Japan’s request to the German navy for a kapellmeister. As a conductor for the Japanese navy and teacher at military and civilian music schools, he was among the most influential European musicians in Japan in the 1800s.
Eckert is widely considered the composer of Japan’s national anthem, Kimi ga yo, though he maintained that he merely arranged an old Japanese melody.
This according to “German military musicians in Japan during the early Meiji Era (since 1868)” by Wolfgang Suppan and Wilhelm Baethge (Journal of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles III [1996] pp. 13-32). Below, Kimi ga yo as it was sung by Koyanagi Yuki and the audience when Japan played Trinidad and Tobago in 2006.
Related article: The Sultan’s bagpipes
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Filed under Asia, Romantic era
Phonetic translation
The first generation of Danish rock musicians started out as fans of international stars, learning the songs by listening to the records. The lyrics they sang often were nonsense, as they had been written down from the recordings by teenagers with only limited English skills. The sound of the words and the language was more important than the semantic meaning of the lyrics.
This practice was highlighted in the mid-1970s, when two bands, Shu-bi-dua and Bamses Venner, released debut albums that contained Danish versions of rock classics and contemporary international hits. Both bands employed phonetic translations, translating the sound of the words instead of the meaning. A well-known example is Shu-bi-dua’s Kylling med soft ice og pølser (Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages), which is the title of a Danish version of Roberta Flack’s Killing me softly with his song.
Kylling og softice og pølser/Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages
Det er min favourite menu/That’s my favorite menu
Mon der noget bedre/Surely there’s nothing better
End pølsegrillens røg/Than grilled sausage smoke
Og så en herlig hot-dogs med brutale løg/And then heavenly hotdogs with raw onions
To tykke og en kage/Two fat ones and a cake
Og godt med begge dele/And good both ways
Kylling og softice og pølser/Chicken with soft ice cream and sausages
Det er min favourite menu/That’s my favorite menu …
You can hear the song here.
This according to “Kylling med soft ice og pølser”: Populærmusikalske versioneringspraksisser i forbindelse med danske versioner af udenlandske sange i perioden 1945–2007 by Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, a dissertation accepted by Københavns Universitet, Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab in 2007.
BONUS: In 1972 Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol (below) poked a stick in the ribs of Italian singers who pretended to speak and understand English. Celentano’s song consisted of nonsense lyrics that in many cases sound remarkably close to North American English speech.
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Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Popular music
Bach and personal conflict
Bach’s life was shaken by several confrontations and traumatic events that had important repercussions on his personal and professional development.
One of the first documented conflicts with authority occurred when he was just nine years old, following the loss of both of Bach’s parents, when his brother Johann Christoph confiscated a manuscript that Sebastian had copied behind his back. When this event is conceptualized in terms of recent research on coping with trauma and trauma recovery, it reveals Bach’s sense of vulnerability to authorities and the establishment of a lifelong approach to resolving conflict.
Patterns of action throughout Bach’s early career reveal efforts towards autonomy and independence through outward resolutions of conflicts with authority. When he was in Leipzig the authorities’ lack of enthusiasm for music made him consider departing from this prestigious position. His previous conflicts with authorities resulted in just such a departure; however, his decision to stay in Leipzig reflects a different mode of conflict resolution, one that involves inward reflection rather than assertive confrontation.
This according to “From Ohrdruf to Mühlhausen: A subversive reading of Bach’s relationship to authority” by Sara Botwinick (BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute XXXV/2 [2004] pp. 1–59).
Above, Bach as he may have appeared in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig; below, the beautifully reflective Ich habe genug, BWV 82, from February 1727, four years into his Leipzig tenure.
More posts about J.S. Bach are here.
Filed under Baroque era, Curiosities
Malmsteen and classical music
Two televised performances galvanized the young Yngwie Malmsteen: one by Jimi Hendrix when Malmsteen was 8, and, when he was 13, one by a violinist playing works by Paganini.
Malmsteen has openly embraced the premises of classical music more than any rock musician before him. With his fetishization of instrumental technique and his move toward absolute music he adopted classical music’s style and vocabulary, models of virtuosic rhetoric, and modes of practice, pedagogy, and analysis; he also adopted the social values that underpin these activities.
This according to Running with the devil: Power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music by Robert Walser (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993, pp. 94–98).
Today is Malmsteen’s 50th birthday! Below, the birthday boy holds forth.
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Filed under Popular music
Mise en scène
In 2012 Brepols launched the series Mise en scène with Giacomo Puccini et Albert Carré: Madame Butterfly à Paris.
Musicologists and stage directors are familiar with the staging manuals (disposizioni sceniche) for Verdi’s later operas, which resulted directly from the composer’s contact with French practice. Yet the French livrets de mise en scène, intended to provide theater directors wishing to produce a work with its complete mise en scène, are still little known.
The publication with annotations and illustrations of a series of stage manuals for important works in the French operatic repertoire, from Auber’s La Muette de Portici (Paris Opéra, 1828) to more modern works—Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole—will provide researchers and directors with very useful tools, giving access to the original visual, dramatic, and decorative elements of Parisian productions (often thought out by the librettist and the composer). Knowing how works were originally staged can be both enlightening and inspiring. These manuals, providing faithful accounts of theatrical works, have much to offer theater historians and those working in opera.
Below, Anna Moffo sings Butterfly’s Death Scene.
Related article: Italian opera manuals
Filed under New series, Opera
From war tanks to church bells
During their Revolution (1974–91) the Ethiopian penchant for not throwing anything away was, out of necessity, given full rein; ammunition boxes were converted to book satchels, artillery shells were made into pots and pans, and so on.
In one instance, a traditional three-piece gong ensemble associated with the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church was made from components of an abandoned Soviet-made tank; some 600 of these tanks were used in Ethiopia during the 1970s and 1980s. Struck by an acolyte using a small stone, the gongs mark the beginnings of services and other notable events.
This according to “Make army tanks for war into church bells for peace: Observations on musical change and other adaptations in Ethiopia during the 1990s” by Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, an essay included in Turn up the volume! A celebration of African music (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1999, pp. 124–131).
Above, the bells in question; below, a comparable set of Ethiopian stone chimes (please turn your screen or head sideways).
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Filed under Africa, Curiosities
RILM Retrospective is now online!
Editor’s note: While this retrospective collection is still available to subscribers, it is no longer offered as a separate product; we have decided to let this post remain online for its historical interest.
EBSCOhost has just launched RILM Retrospective Abstracts of Music Literature.
Reflecting myriad currents of thought—the twilight of Romanticism and the dawn of Modernism, the rise and fall of Marxism, and the advent of multiculturalism, to name just a few—RILM Retrospective offers a fascinating window on intellectual history through the prism of music. This constantly updated database documents an ever-expanding intellectual universe, not a straight line of progressive development. Looking back across the arc of history, we can begin to see how outlooks were formed, and we can assess the roles of the various currents and sidetracks that have shaped the disciplines that we pursue. The unique place of music in human life is salient at every turn.
When Barry S. Brook founded RILM in 1966 he set the cutoff date for coverage at 1967; however, he recognized the importance of similar coverage of earlier materials. He therefore initiated a retrospective series and commenced work on a volume that would cover conference reports published before 1967; this book was finally published by RILM in 2004 thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and its contents, and updates to it, are part of RILM Restrospective. Another project that Brook envisioned, a volume covering Festschriften, was partially completed with a book published by RILM in 2009 thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; that book’s contents, along with over twice as many additional records, are also part of this database. RILM is now focusing on retrospective coverage of scholarly journals, adding at least 350 records each month.
Conference reports
Papers presented at conferences represent the cutting-edge research of their day, giving a snapshot of that moment in the development of their fields. Further, the changing nature and frequency of conferences over time can be tracked through this database; for example, The only 19th-century conferences devoted solely to music focused on Gregorian chant, and were held under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church; otherwise, musical topics arose only in conferences devoted to history, folklore, psychology, or questions of public and private property. The first conferences devoted to studies in musicology were held in 1900, in Paris.
Festschriften
Festschriften enact visions of order in both synchronic and diachronic domains. In the synchronic realm, they depict order within, and among, disciplines and institutions. They represent diachronic order in their images of history—also within disciplines and institutions, as well as within the overarching history of music. For example, by 1966 postmodern irony had not yet become fashionable, nor had the new-music world splintered completely. The narrative of contemporary music still related it directly to a salutary evolution from antiquity to the present. Some of the rhetoric of the serialists was downright utopian, and, especially after they had Stravinsky on board, many people assumed that they indeed represented the wave of the future. The academy was also more unified, and while ethnomusicologists were not universally welcomed into music departments, the cutthroat culture wars were yet to be fought.
Journals
Journals, particularly those devoted to specific disciplines or subdisciplines, allow similar tracking of intellectual developments, including the differentiation of particular scholarly streams. For example, before World War II papers on non-Western and traditional Western musics largely came from the field of folklore—a rather woolly domain at that time, whose denizens ranged from wide-eyed dilettantes to rigorous collectors and cataloguers—or from the young sciences of ethnology, anthropology, and psychology. In the 1950s attempts to synthesize the particular challenges and insights involved with all of these studies began to coalesce under the term ethno-musicology (the hyphen was soon abandoned), and beginning around that time several of the scholars involved were using journal articles to try to define their field and its dynamics.
Above, the back and front covers of RILM’s first publication (click to enlarge).
The Sultan’s bagpipes
When he came to power in 1970, Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman began efforts aimed at modernization and reversing isolationism. Having graduated from an English military academy and served in a Scottish regiment, he had developed a taste for Western military band and Scottish bagpipe music.
During the 1970s and 1980s several military wind bands and bagpipe bands were founded at his command, with only Omani musicians allowed. The pressure to perform well was intense, and a high standard of musicianship was attained in a fairly short time.
Increasingly, efforts are being made to include Arabic music in the repertoire; bagpipes are considered particularly suitable, as their intervals match some Arabic scales better than those of wind band instruments.
Below, the Royal Army of Oman‘s pipe and drum band.
Related article: The Sultan’s pipe organ
Filed under Asia, Curiosities
