by | December 13, 2009 · 2:49 pm

Technical drawings

Technical drawings of instruments are of interest to instrument builders, organologists, and iconographers—they may also be useful for researchers working on performance practice, theory, or aesthetics. Technical drawings may also be found as freestanding publications issued by museums and collections to encourage reconstructions of the historical instruments that they own.

This example from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650) shows the inner workings of a claviorganum, which Michael Praetorius described in his Syntagma musicum.II: De organographia (1619) as a keyboard instrument in which strings and pipes “sound together to produce a pleasing sound”.

Below, a claviorganum in action.

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by | December 12, 2009 · 4:58 pm

Blues magazines

 

Blues magazines like Living blues, Real blues, and Blues revue attest to the continuing vitality of a genre that dates at least back to the 1910s, when the first blues songs were published. Unlike the recording companies that capitalized on the “blues craze” of the Roaring Twenties, these magazines are interested in all forms of African American roots music—including sacred and other secular traditions—and their modern counterparts, including zydeco, gospel, and so on, fostering a thriving community of enthusiasts.

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Filed under Ethnomusicology, Jazz and blues, Music magazines

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by | December 8, 2009 · 2:47 pm

Music on money

Like postage stamps, musical subjects depicted on money represent a type of iconography that is controlled by governmental organizations; their didactic goals are minimal, and their political role is paramount. Most often they involve the celebration of a national composer whose work embodied and enacted a national character—but their symbolism occasionally misfires.

For example, the above Romanian  50,000 lei banknote pictures George Enescu on the front alongside some recognizable musical images, but the depiction of a Bucegi-Mountains rock formation known in Romania as The Sphinx, which appears to be a reference to the character of the Sphinx in the composer’s opera Oedipe, was judged to be sufficiently puzzling to merit a redesign omitting the image.

This according to “Music on money: State legitimation and cultural representation” by Marin Marian-Bălaşa (Music in art XXVIII 1–2, pp. 173–189.

Related article: Enescu and makam

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by | December 7, 2009 · 12:33 pm

Journal of music research online

The Music Council of Australia launched the Journal of music research online (ISSN 1836-8336) in 2009. The journal intends to publish English-language articles on composition, early music, ethnomusicology, gender studies, interdisciplinary studies, music technologies, musicology, pedagogy, performance practice, and popular music; its first issue presents articles on Ravel and the influence of online social networking on music making and higher education.

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by | December 3, 2009 · 12:08 pm

Res musica

Res musica (ISSN 1736-8553), a peer-reviewed annual journal, was launched by the Eesti Muusikateaduse Selts and the Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia in 2009; its editor-in-chief is Urve Lippus (above). The journal aims to be a widely disseminated forum for Estonian researchers in all areas of music, making a unique contribution to the international discipline by synthesizing German- and English-language scholarly traditions with Estonian musicological discourse. Articles in volume 1 focused on historical studies of Baltic music, pedagogy, and musical life.

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by | November 30, 2009 · 1:36 pm

Musicalia: Časopis Českého muzea hudby

The České Muzeum Hudby in Prague launched its semiannual journal Musicalia: Časopis Českého muzea hudby (ISSN 1803-7828) in late 2009. Founded in 1976, the museum owns about 750,000 items including music and nonmusic manuscripts, books, iconography, composers’ estates, instruments, sound recordings, and press clippings; the Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany and the Muzeum Antonína Dvořáka are under its auspices. Musicalia, which is published bilingually in Czech and English, is devoted to sources for the history of music and musical culture and to information about the museum’s acquisitions, exhibitions, conferences, and publications. The journal is edited by Jana Vojtěšková and Dagmar Štefancová; its first issue includes essays about Martinů, Dvořák, Vinzenz Maschek, the Missale Olomucense, and a piano played by Mozart.

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by | November 25, 2009 · 12:28 pm

Conference reports

Conference reports illuminate intellectual history with a window on a particular moment. Since conference papers present the most current scholarship, a collection from a single conference provides a glimpse of the state of research on many topics at that time.

RILM recently published the papers from our first conference in Music’s intellectual history, and our retrospective coverage of conference reports, Speaking of Music: Music conferences, 1835–1966, was issued in 2004. The preface to the latter book provides an overview of this publication type.

The photo above is from the American Musicological Society‘s International Congress of Musicology in 1939. Standing: Harold Spivacke, Otto Kinkeldey, Otto Gombosi, Knud Jeppesen, Fernando Liuzzi, Gustave Reese. Seated: Edward J. Dent, Carleton Sprague Smith, Curt Sachs, Alfred Einstein, Dayton C. Miller.

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by | November 17, 2009 · 3:01 pm

The choral scholar

 

The choral scholar (ISSN 1948-3058), a peer-reviewed journal launched in 2009 by the National Collegiate Choral Organization, is dedicated to “presenting outstanding scholarship related to the study and performance of choral music”—including such topics as conducting and pedagogy, in addition to musicological research; it also welcomes studies that directly involve choral music from fields other than music. The journal’s first issue includes articles on vocal physiology, performance practice, repertoire, and compositional style.

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by | November 16, 2009 · 3:12 pm

Album covers

fela-zombie

Record album covers comprise a genre of music iconography that shows how musicians wish to be perceived—or how their producers wish them to be perceived. This type of iconography makes no claim to objectivity; rather, it explicitly presents images meant to arouse specific associations with the recorded music inside.

For example, the cover of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s 1977 album Zombie shows him brightly dressed, singing and gesturing defiantly, facing images of Nigerian soldiers: the zombies of the scathing title song, which satirizes these enforcers of the military government. The singer appears as a vibrant, strong leader, while the soldiers are depicted in a jagged, grey collage—as dehumanized and sinister as the zombies of horror fiction.

Below, Sahr Ngaujah and the cast of Fela! perform Zombie on Broadway.

Click here for more on music iconography.

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by | November 12, 2009 · 12:09 pm

Opera musicologica

opera musicologica

In 2009 the Sankt-Peterburgskaâ Gosudarstvennaâ Konservatoriâ imeni N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova launched Opera Musicologica (ISSN 2075-4078). This peer-reviewed quarterly journal aims to provide a platform for dialogues between different schools and areas of musical scholarship, to present a wide spectrum of topics and methods, and to give space to understudied areas, new scholarly problems, and interdisciplinary approaches. Edited by the scholar of twentieth-century American music Olga Manulkina, Opera Musicologica is published in Russian with Russian and English abstracts. The first issue presents archival documents and essays highlighting the Conservatory’s history on the eve of its 150th anniversary; the issue’s table of contents and English abstracts are here.

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