by | March 11, 2016 · 6:00 am

Carl Ruggles’s consistent inconstancy

Carl Ruggles (Thomas Hart Benton 1934)

Carl Ruggles’s œuvre, although small, is powerful, finely crafted, and intensely individual; his compositions are not easily mistaken for those of any other composer. An individuality so audibly recognizable points to distinctive musical characteristics and procedures.

A pervasive theme in Ruggles’s music is the tension between consistent compositional procedures and the composer’s determination not to use them systematically. This consistent inconstancy is integral both to Ruggles’s compositional method and to his aesthetic.

This according to A vast simplicity: The music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen P. Slottow (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2009).

Today is Ruggles’s 140th birthday! Above, a 1934 portrait by his friend Thomas Hart Benton; below, Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Cleveland Orchestra in his celebrated Sun-treader.

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by | March 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Indie pop and kitsch

 

Indie pop has had a complicated relationship with mass culture—it simultaneously depends upon and deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth, and it is especially adept at generating personal authenticity.

It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood as an aesthetic and not a synonym for bad. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors.

The honesty of indie pop does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.

This according to “‘…This little ukulele tells the truth’: Indie pop and kitsch authenticity” by Emily I. Dolan (Popular music XXIX/3 [October 2010] pp. 457-469).

Below, Stephin Merritt, whose music and career serve as a case study in the article.

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by | March 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

David Gilmour and Polly Samson

 

In an interview, the Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked why, when he could get any lyricist to write for him, he chooses to work with his wife, Polly Samson.

“When you’ve got such a good lyricist so close by, I could not feel the point in going elsewhere” he replied.

“Polly and I are on a working partnership as well as a life partnership and she’s as good as I can get. Other lyricists would be writing more for themselves than for me and they would not know me that well. If I asked Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan to write for me, I love their work but I don’t know these people. So it seems to me more artistically sound to work with someone who I live and breathe with every day.”

Quoted in “Q&A: David Gilmour” by Emmanuel Legrand (Billboard CXVIII/8 [25 February 2006] p. 31).

Today is Gilmour’s 70th birthday! Below, On an island, one of many songs that Gilmour has co-written with Samson.

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by | March 3, 2016 · 6:00 am

Translingual discourse in ethnomusicology

TDE

 

Translingual discourse in ethnomusicology is a new peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal aiming at encouraging discourse across language barriers by publishing English translations of ethnomusicological papers that have originally appeared in other languages and therefore probably not received their due recognition.

Papers are selected from proposals made by our Editorial Board and undergo a double-open peer-review process. The English translations are usually accompanied by the original version and are freely available (open access) in both HTML and PDF format.

This journal is jointly published by the musicology department at Universität Wien and the ethnomusicology department at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz, and is sponsored by the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung.

Below, the Dubrovnik-area linđo, the subject of one of the articles in the inaugural issue.

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by | March 1, 2016 · 12:00 am

Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance

Valuable conclusions can be reached on the aesthetic and moral perceptions of Dimitri Mitropoulos from the study of his commercial and private recordings and his concert programs.

Mitropoulos was a unique interpreter who combined respect for significant works of historical Western music with the fight to project characteristic examples of the musical language of the 20th century. Far from the dictates of popular and easy recognitions, he gave us his own, often idiosyncratic, point of view of a morally honest and aesthetically valuable interpretation.

This according to “Ο Δ. Μητρόπουλος και το ήθος της ερμηνείας” [Dimitri Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance] by Stathīs A. Arfanīs and Giōrgos Maniatīs, an essay included in Δημήτρης Μητρόπουλος (1896-1960): πενήντα χρόνια μετά [Dimitris Mitropoulos (1896–1960): Fifty years later] (Athīna: Orpheus Edition, 2012).

Today is Mitropoulos’s 120th birthday! Below, rehearsing and performing with the New York Philharmonic.

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by | February 28, 2016 · 6:00 am

Svend Asmussen and Benny Goodman

 

In 1948 Benny Goodman invited the Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen to consider coming to the U.S. to play in his band. Asmussen agreed, but he soon discovered that the U.S. Musicians Union had other ideas.

To play in Goodman’s band musicians had to be union members; but the union required foreigners to live in the U.S. for one year and have a sponsor to pay them before they could join. As Asmussen recalled, “That means you had to spend a year in America without playing or making any money.”

The two finally had a chance to perform together in Copenhagen in 1981; it was Goodman’s last recorded live performance.

This according to “Svend Asmussen: Phenomenal jazz fiddler” by Richard J. Brooks (Fiddler magazine XII/1 (Spring 2005) pp. 4–12).

Today is Asmussen’s 100th birthday! Below, history in the making.

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by | February 25, 2016 · 6:00 am

Pueri concinite

 

pueri concinite

In 2015 A-R Editions issued a new critical edition of Pueri concinite by Johann von Herbeck (1831–77). This edition is the first to present the piece in its original orchestration with complete scholarly apparatus.

Herbeck was a major musical figure in Vienna in the third quarter of the 19th century. He was, at various points in his career, conductor of the Wiener Männergesang-Verein, conductor of the Singverein, musical director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, musical director of the Hofmusikkapelle, and director of the Hofoper.

Pueri concinite has proved to be Herbeck’s best-known and best-loved work. The tenor soloist in the first performance, on Christmas Day 1868, was Gustav Walter, who was associated with the Hofoper. Walter was the first in a long line of tenor soloists, including Placido Domingo in modern times, who have sung this piece in the Wiener Hofkapelle and other venues.

Below, Domingo sings the work with the Wiener Sängerknaben.

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by | February 22, 2016 · 6:00 am

Boy bands and the critics

 

While the boy band genre has mutated and evolved, its popular portrayal has altered little since groups like New Edition and New Kids on the Block conquered the charts back in the late 1980s.

Recent critical commentaries suggest that four discourses—youth, exploitation, gender, and fandom— interlock to determine how writers discuss the genre. Collectively their result is a relative stasis in critical commentary that helps to allay wider anxieties about the idea that, in a capitalist society, any of us can actively and pleasurably engage with a musical genre led by its own marketing.

This according to “Multiple damnations: Deconstructing the critical response to boy band phenomena” by Mark Duffett (Popular music history VII/2 [August 2012] pp. 185–97). Below, New Edition in the 1980s.

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by | February 18, 2016 · 6:00 am

Toothwalker sounds

 

In 1996 a two-week expedition to the Walrus Islands in the Bering Sea was undertaken to record the sounds of Pacific walruses, both for use in musical compositions and to add to the baseline data on acoustic disturbance and walrus behavior collected by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

There was an opportunity during the expedition to use a hydrophone to record the animals’ underwater communications, which include a gonging sound, whistling, grunting, roaring, and clacking of teeth.

This according to “Toothwalkers” by Douglas Quin (Terra nova: Nature and culture II/3 [summer 1997] pp. 88–96). Toothwalker refers to Linnaeus’s designation of the walrus as Odobenus rosmarus (tooth-walking sea horse).

Below, the celebrated E.T. demonstrates his repertoire and expertise.

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by | February 15, 2016 · 6:00 am

Dortmunder Schriften zur Musikpädagogik und Musikwissenschaft

Ludwig Uhland und seine Komponisten

In 2015 Technische Universität Dortmund launched the series Dortmunder Schriften zur Musikpädagogik und Musikwissenschaft with Ludwig Uhland und seine Komponisten: Zum Verhältnis von Musik und Politik in Werken von Conradin Kreutzer, Friedrich Silcher, Carl Loewe und Robert Schumann by Burkhard Sauerwald.

The large number of settings of his poems is one indication of the significance of the poet, politician, and scholar Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862) in 19th-century intellectual history.

The composers employed a variety of compositional strategies to convey the linguistic characteristics of Uhland’s poetry, such as their folk-like vocabulary and design. A detailed excursus of the Uhland–Silcher song Der gute Kamerad provides a representative example of the history of the political reception of Uhland settings.

Below, Richard Tauber sings Der gute Kamerad.

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