In The saint of Bleecker Street, which earned Menotti the 1955 Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the microcosm of Little Italy suggests a new reflection on questions of difference and integration, with connections to metaphysical and religious ideas. As a metaphor for American society, the opera symbolizes all multicultural societies and reveals the polysemic character of Menotti’s works.
Today is Menotti’s 100th birthday! Above, the 2011 Dicapo Opera production of The saint of Bleecker Street; below, the opera’s finale from New York City Opera’s 1978 production.
At launch, the Jukebox already included over 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other U.S. labels, including Columbia, Okeh, and some Universal Music Group-owned labels. The selections range from jazz and popular styles to ethnic traditions to Western classical works, including opera arias.
Above, a Victor acoustical recording session ca. 1920.
Subsequent themes have included composers with significant 2010 anniversaries; reception; relationships between composition, performance, and pedagogy; fusions; and women in music. The journal’s Editor-in-chief is Valentina Sandu Dediu.
Music philately began with the issuance of some of the very first postage stamps in the mid-nineteenth century: The inaugural issues of several European countries included images of post horns. Purists may argue that post horns were mere signaling devices, but at that time they were already being used in classical compositions, so their depictions may be considered musical images.
Other nineteenth-century stamps featured depictions of prominent political figures who were also musicians—for example, Argentina issued a stamp honoring the statesman and composer Juan Bautista Alberdi in 1888 (left)—but they were concerned with politics rather than music. The first explicitly musical stamp was Poland’s issuance honoring Ignacy Jan Paderewski in 1919.
Through the 1950s countries increasingly celebrated Western classical musicians and composers. In the 1960s all aspects of musical life became potential subjects—institutions, festivals, instruments, dancers, and so on—and non-European countries asserted their national identities with images of their own traditional and historical music cultures. In the later twentieth century images of popular and jazz musicians gained increasing demand .
This according to A checklist of postage stamps about music by Johann A. Norstedt (London: Philatelic Music Circle, 1997), which lists some 14,000 stamps with music-related images.
Above, stamps issued in Northern Cyprus in 1985, which was designated European Music Year by the Europa Federation (click images to enlarge). Below, a curious video about Robert Burns iconography.
In his day, the blind Aragonese composer and organist Pablo Bruna (known as El Ciego de Daroca) was renowned for his organ playing at the Colegiata de Santa María de los Corporales in Daroca (above), for his important disciples, and for his keyboard works. Today is his 400th birthday!
A previously unknown work by Bruna—A de la casa, a villancico for soprano and tenor with unfigured bass—was discovered in 1990 in the musical archive of Barbastro Cathedral. The text stems from the custom of giving food to the poor, which in Bruna’s work is given a Eucharistic interpretation. Only three other vocal works by Bruna have survived: two other villancicos and a Benedicamus Domino.
This according to “A de la casa: Duo de Pablo Bruna—Una obra inedita del Ciego de Daroca” by Pedro Calahorra Martínez (Nassarre: Revista aragonesa de musicología VII/1 [1991], pp. 9–20). Below, Saskia Roures performs Bruna’s Tiento de falsas de 2º tono.
The Kronos Quartet has been politically engaged since its founding in 1973, and their forays into world music carry political messages as well as aesthetic ones. Inevitably, these ventures have enmeshed the group in the anxious narratives surrounding the world music phenomenon.
Critics cite the appropriation and alienation of non-Western musics and techniques as economic and cultural capital for first-world performers, entrepreneurs, and recording companies, while admirers cite sensitivity and homage, cultural exchange, and a faith in the intercultural transcendence of aesthetic values that enacts a basis for peaceful cooperation.
Although the group’s continuing commitment to crossing cultural borders and raising political issues has been branded as hypocritical in the context of their signing with Nonesuch Records, which is owned by the media giant Time Warner, their efforts should command respect from those who seek to discredit the myth that music can—and should—exist in an autonomous world apart from that of society.
This according to “Postmodern eclecticism and the world music debate: The politics of the Kronos Quartet” by David Bennett (Context: A journal of music research 29–30 [2005] pp. 5–15). Above, the quartet performs with the pipa player Wu Man; below, with the Azerbaijani muğam singer Alim Qasımov and his ensemble.
The Finnish band Eläkeläiset (The Pensioners) is known for playing humorous cover versions of well-known pop and rock songs—including heavy metal—to a fast humppa beat (a traditional Finnish polka-like dance style). The other thing Eläkeläiset is known for is public drunkenness: The group’s members are notably inebriated for all of their performances and recordings.
This according to Eläkeläiset: Suuri suomalainen juopottelukirja (Eläkeläiset: The great Finnish drinking book) by Ilkka Mattila (Helsinki: Like, 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2008). Below, Eläkeläiset’s version of Zombie by The Cranberries.
In 1996 Mira Omerzel-Terlep reported that a bone fragment excavated at the Divje Babe I cave site in Slovenia is considered to be the oldest man-made flute, dating from 45,000 years ago (“Koščene piščali: Pričetek slovenske, evropske in svetovne inštrumentalne glasbene zgodovine” [Bone whistles: Origins of the Slovenian, European, and world history of instrumental music], Etnolog: Glasnik Slovenskega Etnografskega Muzeja/Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum VI, pp. 235–294). Further studies sought to demonstrate that the fragment had originally belonged to an instrument capable of producing a diatonic scale.
Other researchers were skeptical, though, and in 1998 Paola Villa et al. tried to put the speculation to rest, showing that the holes in the bone were the results of gnawing by animals (“A Middle Paleolithic origin of music? Using cave-bear bone accumulations to assess the Divje Babe I bone ‘flute’”, Antiquity LXXII/275 [March], pp. 65–79).
The argument has not abated. In 2002 a pair of essays staking out the opposing camps was issued in Archäologie früher Klangerzeugung und Tonordnung/The archaeology of sound origin and organization; Musikarchäologie in der Ägäis und Anatolien/Music archaeology in the Aegean and Anatolia (Rahden: Leidorf); April Nowell states that the results of taphonomic testing offered no viable proof that the bone fragment was an instrument (“Is a cave bear bone from Divje Babe, Slovenia, a Neanderthal flute?” pp. 69–81) while Robert Fink presents research supports the theory that it was (“The Neanderthal flute and origin of the scale: Fang or flint? A response” pp. 83–87).
More recently, an exhaustive study by Cajus G. Diedrich of Paleo-Logic, Independent Institute of Geosciences, ends with the conclusion that “The ‘cave bear cub femora with holes’ are, in all cases, neither instruments nor human made at all” (Royal Society Open Science, 2 : 140022; the paper can be read in full here).
Still, the controversy is alive and thriving on the Internet.
Below, Ljuben Dimkaroski performs on a reconstruction of the alleged original bone flute.
Part of the Library of Congress’s American Memoryseries, Fiddle tunes of the old frontier: The Henry Reed Collection is a multiformat collection of traditional fiddle tunes played by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, recorded by Alan Jabbour in 1966 and 1967, when Reed was over eighty years old. The tunes represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of Virginia’s Appalachian frontier; many of them passed back into circulation during the fiddling revival of the later twentieth century.
The collection includes 184 sound recordings, 19 pages of field notes, and 69 transcriptions of Reed’s fiddling with notes on tune histories and musical features; an illustrated essay on Reed’s life, art, and influence; a list of related publications; and a glossary of musical terms.
Above, Reed with Bobbie Thompson (guitar) at the Narrows (Virginia) Fiddlers Contest, summer 1967. Below, Alan Jabbour performs a tune that he learned from Henry Reed.
Launched by Intellect in 2010, Journal of European popular culture (ISSN 2040-6134; EISSN 20406142)investigates the present and past creative cultures of Europe. Exploring European popular imagery, media, new media, film, music, art and design, architecture, drama and dance, fine art, literature and the writing arts, and more, this peer-reviewed journal is also of interest to those considering the influence of European creativity worldwide. It is edited by Graeme Harper, Owen Evans, and Cristina Johnston.
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