Tag Archives: Composers

by | September 30, 2010 · 6:22 am

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.

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by | August 11, 2010 · 8:21 am

Hugo Wolf: Briefe

Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag launched the series Hugo Wolf: Briefe (1873–1901) in 2010 with Briefe 1873–91 (ISBN 978-3-902681-20-1), edited by Leopold Spitzer. The series is being issued in conjunction with the publisher’s complete edition of Wolf’s works.

Above, the composer with the mezzo-soprano Frieda Zerny, possibly holding a letter from him (see Wolf and Zerny, Briefe an Frieda Zerny [Wien: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag , 1978]).

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Filed under New editions, New series, Romantic era

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by | August 8, 2010 · 8:31 am

Macunaíma and brasilidade

In Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaíma, the hero without character) by the Brazilian musicologist, ethnomusicologist, poet, and cultural activist Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), the title character leaves his home deep in the jungle for a mystical quest to São Paulo to retrieve the muiraquitã, an amulet said to embody all of the history and traditions of his culture. Macunaíma succeeds in his mission, but in the process he undergoes a series of dramatic transformations; finally, he is changed into a constellation. He leaves for the firmament with a cryptic remark: He was not brought into the world to be a stone.

The story can be read as a metaphor for the cultural developments that Andrade helped to shape: He advocated bringing the jungle to the city to create the modernist aesthetic of brasilidade that informed the growth of the Brazilian creative arts and the parallel development of musicology and ethnomusicology there. Like Macunaíma, Brazilian modernism did not come into the world to be a stone, with all its implications of rigidity, contour, and well-defined boundaries—rather, brasilidade relishes improvisation, exploration, and fluid boundaries that can be perpetually transformed.

This according to “Macunaíma out of the woods: The intersection of musicology and ethnomusicology in Brazil” by James Melo, an essay included in our recently published Music’s intellectual history.

Related article: Tropicália and Bahia

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by | July 29, 2010 · 12:00 pm

Fitzwilliam Handeliana

In 2009 the music publisher Edition HH launched Fitzwilliam Handeliana, a series of publications of Handelian music inspired by manuscript holdings in The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The first volume in the series, Compositions for harpsichord and organ, is a collection of works by the founder himself: Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745–1816). Edited by Gerald Gifford, the museum’s Honorary Keeper of Music, the volume presents rarely seen works by one of Händel’s ardent champions.

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by | July 23, 2010 · 10:46 am

Schola Cantorum Basiliensis: Scripta

The series Schola Cantorum Basiliensis: Scripta was inaugurated by Schwabe Verlag in 2009 with Die frühen Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs: Stil, Chronologie, Satztechnik by Jean-Claude Zehnder. The book follows the young composer’s development from 1699 to 1708, showing how even in his teens Bach’s compositions evinced an innovative, experimental mind at work.

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by | June 21, 2010 · 4:45 pm

Harry Partch’s instruments

Sponsored by American Public Media and The Harry Partch Foundation, the free Internet resource Harry Partch’s instruments includes interviews with Partch, a complete recorded performance of his The bewitched, links to essays by and about Partch, and—perhaps most engagingly—a virtual instrumentarium that allows visitors to “play” each of the 27 instruments that he designed and built via their computer’s mouse or keyboard.

The website was produced as part of the American Mavericks radio and Internet series, which features  the music and stories of visionary American composers. The series is produced in association with the San Francisco Symphony and its Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas.

Below, Partch demonstrates his instruments, ca. 1958 (in two parts).

Related articles:

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by | June 7, 2010 · 11:57 am

Haydn’s skull

After Haydn’s funeral in Vienna his former employer, Prince Esterházy, obtained permission to have the body exhumed and moved to Eisenstadt. The matter apparently then slipped his mind until, 11 years later, a distinguished visitor remarked to him that it was fitting that he possessed the composer’s remains.

Not wishing to contradict his guest’s assumption, Esterházy quickly arranged for the coffin to be brought to Eisenstadt; but when it was opened for identification, the horrified officials discovered a headless body—only Haydn’s wig remained. Inquiries led to the revelation that two students of phrenology had bribed the gravedigger and stolen the composer’s head a few days after the funeral.

Esterházy was furious, and demanded that the skull be returned, but efforts to claim it were thwarted when the wife of its keeper secreted it in her straw mattress and lay down on top of it, feigning illness. When Esterházy offered a bribe, he was given the skull of an old man, and this was placed in Haydn’s coffin. The composer’s skull was not reunited with his other remains until 1954.

This according to “An incongruous postlude” in Haydn: A creative life in music by Karl and Irene Geiringer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For more on Haydn’s physiognomy, see this Bibliolore post.

Above, a drawing of the marble tablet—now lost—erected by Haydn’s devoted pupil Sigismund von Neukomm at the composer’s Viennese resting place in 1814 (click to enlarge). The inscription includes Haydn’s favorite quotation from Horace, non omnis moriar, set by Neukomm as a puzzle canon.

More posts about Haydn are here.

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by | June 1, 2010 · 7:57 am

Operatic degeneracy I

An anonymous pamphlet from around 1733 titled Do you know what you are about? or, A Protestant alarm to Great Britain rails against the egregious inroads that Roman Catholic degeneracy, not least in the form of Italian opera, were making in England.

Händel and Senesino are particularly singled out for “playing at the dog and bear, exactly like the two kings of Poland contending for the Empire of Doremifa” in contrast to the humble, hardworking John Gay, whose praiseworthy Beggar’s opera reached the stage only through his own admirable toil and steadfastness.

This according to William Charles Smith’s “Do you know what you are about?: A rare Handelian pamphlet”, an article in The music review no. 98 (2 April 1964, pp. 114–19); the issue, which honors the 70th birthday of the English librarian, bibliographer, and honorary curator of the Royal Music Library Cecil Bernard Oldman (1894–1969), is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Above, a satirical depiction by John Vanderbank from around 1723 of Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni, and Gaetano Berenstadt performing in a Händel opera (probably Flavio, re di Longobardi).

Related articles:

 

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by | May 17, 2010 · 11:39 am

Alphabetical impressionism

Bach’s use of a musical motive based on his name, B–A–C–H, is well known, and several other composers have used it in tributes to the Baroque master. As connoisseurs of French chamber music also know, Ravel made similar use of the technique of deriving musical material from a composer’s name in his Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Faure and Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn.

Far less known is the further use of this technique by both Debussy and Ravel in more enigmatically titled pieces. For example, several of their works bearing the words hommage or tombeau include musical material derived from the honoree’s name. Such formerly puzzling titles, which have led the curious on wild-goose chases in their attempts to understand what on earth the music had to do with the named composer, may now be understood as sly references to uses of this technique.

This according to “Widmungsstücke mit Buchstaben-Motto bei Debussy und Ravel” by Paul Mies, an essay included in Festschrift für Erich Schenk (Studien zur Musikwissenschaft: Beihefte der Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 25 [1962], pp. 363–368); this journal issue dedicated to the Austrian musicologist Erich Schenk (1902–74) on the occasion of his 60th birthday is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Below, Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, one of the works discussed in the article.

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by | May 11, 2010 · 11:22 am

Musique contemporaine / Contemporary music

Founded in 2007 by a consortium of French and international institutions and ensembles, Musique contemporaine/Contemporary music is a bilingual search engine for contemporary art music resources held at French institutions. Users can listen to excerpts of unpublished sound archives of conferences and concerts and read the program notes for these events. A glossary (in French) defines the main concepts involved in contemporary music, and an interactive structural map provides links to glossary entries, composers’ biographies, work excerpts, and so on. Also included are an interactive tag cloud of the composers who are most referenced, a composers’ timeline, and an interactive map showing the main French contemporary music organizations and providing their addresses. Simple and advanced searching tools are available.

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