Much vocal music has been transcribed for tuba, but little is available for advanced-level players. Coloratura opera arias offer material that would be challenging for more experienced tubists, and these types of arias are much less text-dependent than other kinds of vocal music.
This according to Guidelines for transcribing coloratura opera arias for tuba, with transcriptions of three arias by Vivaldi, Gluck, and Delibes by Robert Lynn, a 2005 dissertation for Ball State University.
Above, a performance by TubaDiva (Jennifer Paradis-Hagar); below, Alessandro Fossi performs Musetta’s aria “Quando me’n vo” from Puccini’s La Bohème.
Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex.
Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexual love. A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas.
In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.
This according to Wagner and the erotic impulse by Laurence Dreyfus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Below, Kirsten Flagstad’s historic recording of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.
Analysis of compositions has long been one of the mainstays of Western musicology. What, in turn, are the mainstays of analysis? We recently checked RILM’s database to see which works have inspired the largest numbers of analytical studies.
The hands-down winner is Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier, BWV 846–93, with 112 analyses—perhaps not terribly surprising since the work comprises 48 preludes and fugues, some of which are fiendishly complex. The rest of the top ten are:
What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behavior at London’s 18th-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary.
“Pots, privies and WCs: Crapping at the opera in London before 1830” by Michael Burden (Cambridge opera journal XXIII/1–2 [March–July 2011] pp. 27–50) sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theaters, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience’s general behavior, the beginnings in London of a listening audience, and the performance of music between the acts.
Burden concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that, in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy, or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.
The book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized 12-tone music, and supplies the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th-century musical repertoire.
The increasing range of Beethoven’s performance indications paralleled the growing depth of expression in his music. While his predecessors had been content with four basic tempos—adagio, andante, allegro, and presto—he began to add qualifiers, indications of gradual tempo change, and descriptive words and phrases in German.
Still unsatisfied, he began to rely on metronome markings, although he stressed that they only provide a point of departure for a performance in which “feeling also has its beat, which cannot wholly be conveyed by a number”.
He started to favor graphic treatments of crescendo and diminuendo, ensuring dynamic shapes that would not necessarily be intuited by the performer. He used sforzando in structural as well as expressive ways, and expanded volume markings beyond the range from pp to ff.
His pedaling indications usually reinforce harmonic contexts, though sometimes they cause harmonic areas to overlap; this might explain why some of Beethoven’s contemporaries complained that his pedaling resulted in a confused sound. His articulation markings often reinforce motivic structure and development.
All of these performance indications are most fully understood in the context of the particular instrument he was using at the time.
This according to “Interpreting Beethoven’s markings: A preliminary survey of the piano sonatas” by Tallis Barker (The music review LV/3 [August 1994] pp. 169–182). Below, Sviatoslav Richter demonstrates his approach to Beethoven’s performance indications.
A 28-year-old woman urgently needed a tooth extraction, and local anesthesia was not an option.
The patient was offered all of the other anesthetizing options, but she chose music instead. A recording of a Rām dhun (Hindu devotional song for the deity Rāma) was played. The patient did not show any signs of pain or any pain behavior during the extraction procedure, indicating that analgesia was induced through music.
This according to “Extraction of a grossly decayed tooth without local anesthesia but with audio analgesia: A case report” by Manish Bhagania and Anirudha Agnihotry (Music and medicine: An interdisciplinary journal III/4 [October 2011] n.p.). Below, Morari Bapu sings the Rām dhun Hare Rām.
Launched in 2011 by the School of Dance at the University of Cape Town, South African dance journal examines past, present, and future perspectives on dance, and aims to create a space for established and emerging dance academic voices in South Africa, Africa, and the international community.
The journal is peer-reviewed, and its preferred language is English; however, contributions in indigenous South African languages will be accommodated at the discretion of the editors, who are also cognizant of the many forms English assumes on this continent, and who endeavor to give them a voice.
The engagement was celebrated with Le Carrousel du Roi, a lavish public extravaganza that involved magnificently costumed processions, wild beasts, giants, acrobats, elaborate floats, numerous court musicians, and an elegant equestrian ballet. Approximately 200,000 people crowded into the Place Royale to watch the spectacle.
This according to “Dances with horses” by Carolyn Miller (Early music America VIII/2 [summer 2002] pp. 30–33). Below, music composed by Lully for a later royal carrousel.
The peoples of the Caribbean welcomed Katharine Dunham and shared their dance cultures with her; her obligations toward them figure in her danced testimonies to their hospitality.
Her solo in L’ag’ya (1938) was not a collusion with colonial ideologies of appropriation—it was a testament to the immediacy of performance and the importance of maintaining a welcoming openness in the face of the overwhelming idea of infinity.
This according to “Hospitality and translation in Katherine Dunham’s L’ag’ya” by Ramsay Burt, an essay included in Proceedings: Society of Dance History Scholars (Stoughton: Society of Dance History Scholars, 2003) pp. 8–11. Above, Dunham with Vanoye Aikens in L’ag’ya in 1938; below, excerpts from Dunham’s solo from a silent 1947 film.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
