Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music inaugurated the series DIAMM facsimiles in 2010 with The Eton choirbook. Edited by Magnus Williamson, the book presents a full-color facsimile edition of Eton College Library MS 178, an iconic source of English choral polyphony composed during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that has been continuously in the possession of Eton College since it was first copied for use in the college chapel in the early 1500s.
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Filed under Middle Ages, New editions, New series
Unbeknownst to most of his admirers, Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–67)—who is widely known as the author of some of the best-loved songs of the twentieth century (including This land is your land) and as the inspiration for singer-songwriters including Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen—was also an indefatigable visual artist.
No documentation exists of Guthrie ever having formally studied art, but he produced thousands of visual art works: line drawings, paintings, illustrations, cartoons, portraits, sculptures, commercial art, and designs. He was keenly interested in the impressionists and the modernists, and worked with abstract as well as figurative themes.
Guthrie filled countless notebooks and journals with drawings and writings, often mixing the two, and at various times in his life he traded his sign-painting skills for food and traded sketches of bar patrons for drinks. He often used art as a political vehicle, particularly by drawing political cartoons. Like his music, his visual art was inspired by the everyday experiences of everyday people.
Guthrie’s visual art is documented with over 300 plates, almost all in full color—even for many of the line drawings, thereby capturing the ambience of blue-lined notebooks, yellowing journals, and decaying construction paper—in Woody Guthrie: Art works (New York: Rizzoli, 2005). Above, Dream (click to enlarge).
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Filed under Visual art
CANTUS: A database for Latin ecclesiastical chant is a free online resource that assembles and publishes indices of over 380,000 chants found in manuscript and early printed sources for the liturgical Office. The database is searchable by text incipit, keyword, Corpus Antiphonalium Officii identification number, or Liturgical occasion.
CANTUS is supported by the University of Waterloo and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Terence Bailey serves as the project’s director.
Filed under Middle Ages, Resources
In an experiment, 250 adults were offered a glass of wine in return for answering a few questions about its taste. After clearing their palates, each received a glass of either cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay and was taken to one of five rooms: four that each featured a different type of music playing in a continuous loop, and a silent one serving as a control. Participants were asked to spend about five minutes sipping the wine, and were told not to converse.
A smaller pilot study had determined the four types of music:
After drinking the wine and listening to the music, participants were asked to rate the wine’s taste on a scale from zero to ten in the categories represented by the music types. In each case, participants perceived the wine in a manner consistent with the music they had listened to while drinking it.
This according to “Wine & song: The effect of background music on the taste of wine” by Adrian C. North (Wineanorak, 2008). In an earlier experiment, documented in “The influence of in-store music on wine selections” (Journal of applied psychology LXXXIV/2 [April 1999] pp. 271–276), North and two colleagues demonstrated that playing music identified with a particular country in a wine shop had a positive influence on sales of wine from that country.
Below, Mario del Monaco shares observations on wine and synesthesia from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.
More posts about synesthesia are here.
Founded by Intellect in 2010, Choreographic practices (ISSN 2040-5669; EISSN 2040-5677) seeks to engender dynamic relationships between theory and practice, choreographer and scholar, so that these distinctions may be shifted and traversed. The journal is edited by Vida L. Midgelow and Jane M. Bacon.
Encompassing a wide range of methodologies and critical perspectives so that interdisciplinary processes in performance can be understood as they intersect with other territories in the arts and beyond—e.g., cultural studies, psychology, phenomenology, geography, philosophy, and economics—Choreographic practices aims to illuminate an emerging and vibrant research area by opening up the nature and scope of dance practice as research and drawing together diverse bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing.
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Filed under Dance, New periodicals
The long-lost pipe organ that belonged to the steamship Britannic, the sister ship of the Titanic, was identified in the collection of the Museum für Musikautomaten in Seewen, Switzerland, when restorers in 2007 discovered the inscription Britanik engraved on each beam under the instrument’s windchests.
After the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the British Admiralty requisitioned all large passenger ships as troop transports or hospital ships, so the Britannic was never outfitted for transocean luxury traffic. Around 1920 the organ, built around 1913 by M. Welte & Söhne, was installed in the villa of the camera manufacturer and designer August Nagel (1882–1943) in Stuttgart; around 1935 he returned it to the manufacturer for unknown reasons. In 1937 it was moved to the reception room of the Radium electric light company in Wipperfürth, where it remained in use until the 1960s.
When the Wipperfürth reception room was turned into a storeroom, the organ was offered for sale but attracted no buyers. Eventually it came to the attention of Heinrich Weiss, the founder of the Museum für Musikautomaten, who quickly acquired it for his collection; the instrument was completed and reinaugurated there On 30 May 1970, but its identity and history remained unknown for decades.
This according to “Orgel des gesunkenen Ozeanriesen Britannic entdeckt: 610 Meter über Meer im Museum für Musikautomaten Seewen in der Schweiz” by Christoph E. Hänggi (Das mechanische Musikinstrument: Journal der Gesellschaft für selbstspielende Musikinstrumente XXXIII/99 [August 2007] pp. 65–68; an English translation is here).
Below, the Britannic organ sings at last!
More articles about organs are here.
Filed under Instruments
Verlag Dohr launched the series Studien zum Dresdner Musikleben im 19. Jahrhundert in 2010 with Schumann und Dresden. Edited by Thomas Synofzik and Hans-Günter Ottenberg, the book presents papers from Robert und Clara Schumann in Dresden: Biographische, kompositionsgeschichtliche und soziokulturelle Aspekte, a conference held in Dresden from 15 to 16 May 2008.
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Filed under New series, Romantic era
Nowadays if a person has heard one work by Prokof’ev it is undoubtedly his symphonic tale Петя и волк (Petâ i volk, Peter and the wolf), which had its premiere 75 years ago today. On that occasion, however, the composer’s initial enthusiasm was dampened.
“I composed the music quickly, approximately within one week,” Prokof’ev recalled, “and another week was spent on the orchestration. It was first performed at a matinée concert in the Moscow Philharmony on May 2, 1936, but the performance was rather poor and did not attract much attention” (translated by Rose Prokofieva in Autobiography, articles, reminiscences [Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2000] pp.88–89). He never could have imagined that Walt Disney and others would turn the piece into one of the most beloved children’s works in the orchestral repertoire!
Above, Sergej, Svâtoslav, Oleg, and Lina Prokof’ev in 1936, the year of the premiere, which occurred a few days after the composer’s 45th birthday.
BONUS FACTOID: People who grew up with the Disney version will recall that the wolf chases the duck, attacks off-camera, and returns licking his chops with the duck’s feathers in his mouth; at the end it turns out that the duck escaped and was simply in hiding for the rest of the story. But in Prokof’ev’s original version, as performed at the premiere, the duck is indeed eaten, and at the end the narrator says “if you listen very carefully you will hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.”
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music
Created by PhD candidates at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and supported by the Centre de Recherche sur les Arts et le Langage, Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales (EISSN 2110-6134) was launched in February 2011. This biannual online journal aims to explore how societies perceive, establish, and illustrate relationships between music and society by considering the significance of music and musical practices in societal organization. Articles are published in French or English.
Each issue is based on a specific topic, enabling dialogue between different academic domains. The inaugural issue, Polyphonie et Société, includes articles dealing with Western classical music, jazz, pedagogy, perception, and linguistics; the table of contents is here.
Filed under New periodicals
Before his departure in 1918 Prokof’ev was fond of taking long walking tours of St. Petersburg with his friends. After he settled in France in the 1920s this hobby took on a new aspect—he bought an enormous car, a second-hand Ballot.
At first he drove around Paris and its environs with his friends, but soon he expanded his scope with trips to the countryside. Sometimes he would plan a route through a selected area and drive off with his wife Lina and some friends to visit historical places and sample the local cuisine. Breakdowns were frequent in those days, and cars were slow, so these trips typically lasted several days.
At the car’s 30th year Prokof’ev replaced the Ballot with a newer and more agile Chevrolet. “Ballot was an old aristocrat” he wrote, “and Chevrolet is a young democrat. It is a thousand times more comfortable to drive in the city and in the mountains, it is mobile and more powerful. But the friendly old Ballot was incomparable on the level road.”
This according to “A story” by Serge Prokofiev, Jr. (Three oranges journal 2 [November 2001] p. 7).
Today is Prokof’ev’s 120th birthday! Above, left to right: Vladimir Sofronitsky, the composer, Vladimir Dukelsky, and Lina Prokof’ev with the Ballot. Below, Svâtoslav Rihter plays Prokof’ev’s Pastoral sonatina, op. 59, no. 3—a work perhaps inspired by such excursions.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Curiosities
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