Hogrefe Verlag für Psychologie inaugurated its series Praxis der Musiktherapie in 2009 with Spiel—Musik—Therapie: Methoden der Musiktherapie mit Kindern und Jugendlichen by Sandra Lutz Hochreutener. The book explores numerous approaches to music therapy for children and adolescents, including silence, improvisation, song composing, instrumental music, body-centered music games, language, and role-playing.
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Filed under New series, Science
Four years ago today RILM launched this blog as an experimental interaction with the community of scholars and librarians that we serve.
We initially intended to highlight things of practical interest to music librarians and researchers—publication types, new periodicals, new series, resources, and so on—and soon realized that our readers would also enjoy learning about particular writings that arouse our curiosity or just make us smile. Our success in this adventure has been gratifying, and we hope that you will continue to share your very useful feedback!
Below, a historic performance of the well-known song written by Mildred and Patty Hill (above).
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.
Filed under Classic era, Curiosities
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.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Musicologists, Performance practice, Reception, Romantic era
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.
Filed under Resources, Romantic era
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.
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Filed under Curiosities
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.
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Filed under New periodicals, Pedagogy
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.
Filed under North America, Resources, World music
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
Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Musicologists, Nature, Notation, Science, Visual art
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.
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Filed under Baroque era, New editions, New series, Opera, Performance practice
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