Beethoven’s missing trunks

After Beethoven’s biographer and sometime secretary Anton Schindler (inset) was exposed as having forged certain entries in the composer’s conversation books, scholarly suspicions were raised regarding all of Schindler’s activities—not least, he was blamed for the 22-month gap in his collection of these books, from mid-September 1820 to June 1822. Since his forgeries had tended toward self-aggrandizement, many scholars assumed that Schindler had destroyed these priceless documents because they somehow undermined the image that he wanted to project.

An article in the Stuttgart Morgenblatt on 5 November 1823 absolves Schindler of this crime. In it, Johann Sporschil profiled the composer in glowing terms and added, by way of a human interest angle, that Beethoven had lost a great deal of his correspondence when he had recently moved from the country to the city. The gap in the missing correspondence exactly matches the gap in the conversation books, indicating that both sets of documents were lost in one or more of the trunks that the composer himself had, in a surviving letter, rued having had to transport.

This according to “Anton Schindler as destroyer and forger of Beethoven’s conversation books: A case for decriminalization” by Theodore Albrecht, an essay included in our recently published Music’s intellectual history. Above, a page from one of the surviving conversation books.

More posts about Beethoven are here.

3 Comments

Filed under Classic era, Curiosities

Postmodernism and performance

According to “Changing the musical object: Approaches to performance analysis” by Nicholas Cook, broad cultural developments associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism have placed an emphasis on reception—on performance rather than on inherent meaning—but the reflection of these developments in musicology has been skewed by that discipline’s retention of the concept of music as written text.

Cook argues that just as writings about music influence performances, so performance style has an impact on musicology, creating the prospect of a historiography predicated not on compositional innovation but on music as it is experienced in everyday life.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson further explores the process wherein developments in performance precede changes in verbal interpretation in “Musicology and performance”; his examples are drawn from Schubert’s lieder and Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. Both essays are included in our recently-published Music’s intellectual history.

Below, a performance of the final section of the Boulez work by the Montreal-based group Codes d’Accès.

Comments Off on Postmodernism and performance

Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Musicologists, Performance practice, Reception, Romantic era

William Yeates Hurlstone

During the 1890s the Royal College of Music’s first Professor of Composition, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), had a stellar roster of students that included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; but Stanford considered William Yeates Hurlstone (1876–1906) to have been his best pupil. Hurlstone’s name is now largely forgotten; his promising career was cut short by bronchial asthma when he was 30.

The Royal College of Music Library, in conjunction with RCM’s Centre for Performance History, has sought to rectify this situation with a new online resource. Launched in May 2010, William Yeates Hurlstone includes a biography of the composer, a catalogue of his works, recordings made as part of RCM’s Hurlstone Centenary day in 2006 featuring performances by RCM staff and students, and reproductions of documents and concert programs from the collections of the two sponsoring institutions.

Below, Hurlstone’s Four characteristic pieces.

2 Comments

Filed under Resources, Romantic era

The D-Day piper

Bill Millin was a 21-year-old private in Britain’s First Special Service Brigade when his unit landed at the front chosen by the Allies for the invasion on 6 June 1944. He was approached shortly before the landings by the brigade’s commanding officer, who asked him to play on the beachhead to raise morale.

While German troops raked the area with artillery and machine-gun fire, Millin marched and played as his fellow soldiers advanced on the German positions through smoke and flame, or fell on the beach. The scene provided an emotional high point in Darryl F. Zanuck’s film The longest day.

This according to “Bill Millin, Scottish D-Day piper, dies at 88” by John F. Burns (The New York times, 20 August 2010). Above, Millin entertains his colleagues a few days after the momentous battle; below, the sequence from The longest day.

Comments Off on The D-Day piper

Filed under Curiosities

Journal of music history pedagogy

Launched in 2010 and edited by C. Matthew Balensuela, Journal of music history pedagogy (EISSN 2155-109X) is a biannual, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication of the Pedagogy Study Group of the American Musicological Society. The journal presents original articles and reviews related to teaching music history at all levels (undergraduate, graduate, or general studies) and in all disciplines (Western, non-Western, concert, or popular musics). Its inaugural issue includes articles about debates and discourses in jazz history textbooks, classroom discussions among music majors, and making music history relevant to the lives of undergraduates.

Comments Off on Journal of music history pedagogy

Filed under New periodicals, Pedagogy

The Dunn Family Collection

Although he never mentioned it in his published writings, the collector and compiler of traditional Irish tunes Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) made wax cylinder recordings of some of his fellow musicians in Chicago, probably in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Once believed lost, 32 of these recordings were discovered in 2003 when David Dunn opened a suitcase that had belonged to his grandfather, who had been a friend of O’Neill. Dunn brought them to the Ward Irish Music Archives in Milwaukee, which contacted the American Folklife Center for help in digitizing them. Several recordings by the renowned uilleann pipe player Patrick J. “Patsy” Touhey (1865–1923) are included, along with performances by four other luminaries of the Chicago Irish music community.

The recordings now comprise the cornerstone of The Dunn Family Collection, an online exhibit hosted by the Ward Archives that also includes manuscripts, artifacts, photographs, and sheet music collected by the instrument maker and repairer Michael J. Dunn (1855–1935). Dunn was also a captain in the Milwaukee Fire Department, while O’Neill—when he was not pursuing his passion for Irish traditional music—served as Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department.

Thanks to Patrick Hutchinson for alerting us about this collection! Patrick plays the uilleann pipes with Bento Boxty.

1 Comment

Filed under North America, Resources, World music

Baroque birdsong

Along with its wide-ranging discussions of theoretical topics, the 1650 treatise Musurgia universalis by the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) includes what may be the first transcriptions of bird songs.

The illustration gives the nightingale’s song followed by those of the chicken, the cuckoo, the quail, and the parrot; the latter says χαίρε (“hello”). Vox cuculi is notated as the familiar falling minor third heard in cuckoo clocks (see below).

A facsimile edition of the treatise has been issued by Georg Olms (Hildesheim, 1970; reprinted 2006).

Related article: Athanasias Kircher’s global reach

3 Comments

Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Musicologists, Nature, Notation, Science, Visual art

Napoli e L'Europa/Naples and Europe

Ut Orpheus Edizioni launched the series Napoli e L’Europa/Naples and Europe in 2009 with a critical edition of Demofoonte by Niccolò Jommelli. The full project, La Scuola Napoletana dal XVII al XIX Secolo, involves the publication of critical and urtext editions of works by composers of the Neapolitan School along with performances by Riccardo Muti and the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini; Demofoonte was performed in conjunction with the Opéra national de Paris in Salzburg, Paris, and Ravenna in spring and summer 2009.

Comments Off on Napoli e L'Europa/Naples and Europe

Filed under Baroque era, New editions, New series, Opera, Performance practice

Mozart effect redux

 

“Spatial performance as a function of early music exposure in rats” (Third triennial ESCOM conference: Proceedings [Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1997], pp. 688–694) reports on an experiment in which 90 rats were randomly assigned to one of three groups: The Mozart group (30 rats) was exposed to a Mozart piano sonata 12 hours a day for 21 days in utero and 60 days after birth. The Glass and White Noise groups were similarly exposed to the music of Philip Glass or to white noise. The rats’ spatial performance in a 12-unit T maze was then assessed; the Mozart-bred animals ran significantly faster and made significantly fewer errors than the Glass-bred or white noise-bred animals.

In “Do rats show a Mozart effect?” (Music perception: An interdisciplinary journal 21/2 [2003], pp. 251–265), Kenneth M. Steele points out that the in utero exposure would have been ineffective because rats are born deaf. Further, a comparison of human and rat audiograms in the context of the frequencies produced by a piano suggests that adult rats are deaf to most of the pitches in the sonata.

“Spatial performance as a function of early music exposure in rats” (Third triennial ESCOM conference: Proceedings [Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1997], pp. 688–694) reports on an experiment in which 90 rats were randomly assigned to one of three groups: The Mozart group (30 rats) was exposed to a Mozart sonata for 12 hours a day—21 days in utero and 60 days after birth. The Glass and White Noise groups were similarly exposed to the music of Philip Glass or to white noise. The rats’ spatial performance in a 12-unit T maze was then assessed, and the Mozart-bred animals ran significantly faster and made significantly fewer errors than the Glass-bred or white noise-bred animals.

 

4 Comments

Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Animals, Classic era, Curiosities, Nature, Reception, Science

Journal of applied arts and health


Intended for a wide community of artists, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, the Journal of applied arts and health (ISSN 2040-2457) was launched by Intellect in 2010. Seeking to provide a forum for interdisciplinary studies of arts in health care and health promotion, it defines health broadly to include physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, occupational, social, and community health.

The journal’s inaugural issue includes two music-related articles: “Choral singing and psychological well-being: Quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey” by Stephen M. Clift, Grenville Hancox, Ian Morrison, Bärbel Hess, Gunter Kreuz, and Don Stewart; and “Emotional responses to music listening: A review of some previous research and an original, five-phase study” by Michael J. Lowis.

Comments Off on Journal of applied arts and health

Filed under New periodicals, Science