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 Users can listen to excerpts of unpublished sound archives of conferences and concerts and read the program notes for these events.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.
Tag Archives: Composers
Musique contemporaine / Contemporary music
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Resources
Mangled Mozart
Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail was first performed in London at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 24 November 1827. Stephanie’s libretto was translated into English and quite freely adapted, and one C. Kramer made numerous and inexplicable changes to the score, editing Mozart’s music, substituting his own numbers for some of the original ones, and adding entirely new numbers. None the wiser, audiences and critics received the mangled work with great enthusiasm.
This according to “The first performance of Mozart’s Entführung in London” by Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) in Essays on music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1956), a collection of his writings issued as a memorial volume; the book is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.
Above, a nineteenth-century engraving depicting a production of the opera in London—perhaps the one that Einstein described. Below, Twyla Tharp and Milos Forman imagine the opera’s premiere in Amadeus.
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Filed under Classic era, Curiosities, Dramatic arts, Opera, Performance practice, Reception, Source studies
Libretto illustrations
Illustrated libretti for eighteenth-century opera performances comprise a specific and unusual type of visual art. Since these engravings were made before the performances, they cannot be interpreted as objective documentation—indeed, clear evidence points to discrepancies between these representations and what the audiences actually saw. Rather, they must be seen as conveying the intention of these occasions, in surprisingly subtle ways.
Christine Fischer demonstrates this way of reading libretto illustrations in “Engravings of opera stage settings as festival books: Thoughts on a new perspective of well-known sources” (Music in art XXXIV/1–2 [2009], pp. 73–88). In the above engraving by Johann Benjamin Müller of the final scene in Maria Antonia Walpurgis’s Talestri, regina delle amazzoni (1760), Fischer notes that the wide gap between the female Amazons and the male Scythians—their leaders both with drawn swords—demonstrates their opposition, but the bridge in the background indicates their impending reconciliation. The message below the surface involves reassurance that the composer’s ongoing consolidation of her political power in Dresden will be beneficial to all, and that her rule will be based on a deep knowledge of state affairs and peaceful collaboration with powerful men.
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Filed under Classic era, Dramatic arts, Literature, Opera, Politics, Reception, Visual art
Der travestirte Hamlet
Der travestirte Hamlet: Eine Burleske in deutschen Knittelversen mit Arien und Chören (1794) was one of several parodies that capitalized on the Hamlet fever that swept the German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Karl Ludwig Giesecke wrote the play; the composer was not indicated, but there are grounds for believing that it was Vincenc Tuček (1773–1821).
The numbers include a song in which Polonius coaches Ophelia on how to seduce Hamlet, a song in which Hamlet insists that he is not afraid of ghosts, and a duet for Hamlet and Ophelia at the end of the “get thee to a nunnery” scene. No one is killed in the play: Polonius avoids Hamlet’s rapier, Ophelia recovers her sanity, the poisoning is averted, and ultimately everyone goes out to drink wine together. The show ends with a choral finale and a contradance.
This according to “Some Viennese Hamlet parodies and a hitherto unknown musical score for one of them” by Peter Branscombe in Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80. Geburtstag (Kassel : Bärenreiter, 1963), which is covered in RILM’s Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.
Above, Edwin Booth as the Melancholy Dane, ca. 1870.
Related article: Comedy versus opera
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Filed under Classic era, Curiosities, Dramatic arts, Humor, Literature
Conceptual art meets musicology
Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid‘s The people’s choice music: The most wanted song/The most unwanted song (Dia Center for the Arts, 1997) presents the results of a research project that used a questionnaire to determine the most desired and most undesired characteristics of popular songs. Two new songs—both composed by Dave Soldier, with lyrics by Nina Mankin—exemplify the poles of the questionnaire results.
The most wanted song is five minutes long and comprises a medium-sized group (guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, violoncello, synthesizer, and low male and female voices) performing in a rock/R&B style. It narrates a love story and has a moderate tempo, volume, and pitch range. It will be enjoyed by approximately 72% of listeners.
The most unwanted song is 22 minutes long and features accordion and bagpipe (tied at 13% as the most unwanted instruments) along with banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, and synthesizer (the only instrument to appear in both ensembles). It involves an operatic soprano rapping and singing atonal music; advertising jingles, political slogans, and elevator music; a children’s choir singing jingles and holiday songs; and dramatic juxtapositions of loud and quiet sections, fast and slow tempos, and very high and very low pitches. Fewer than 200 individuals in the entire world will enjoy it.
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Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Popular music
Mozart's flyswatter
Franz Niemetschek’s legendary report that La clemenza di Tito was composed in 18 days was not seriously challenged until 1960, when Tomislav Volek published important archival materials relating to the chronology of the opera’s composition. Physical evidence from the autograph manuscript, including the remains of a fly squashed on the paper (probably by the composer in the heat of August), contributes to discrediting the hypothesis that Mozart’s work had begun before he signed his July 1791 contract for the opera.
This according to “The chronology of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito reconsidered” by Sergio Durante (Music & letters, 80, no. 4 (Nov 1999): 560–594), where the evidence is described thus:
“On folio 114 of the autograph . . . a thick black spot in the shape of a cross is found. . . . On direct and close examination, the centre of the spot proves to host the remains of a fly (a kind of evidence not often found in music sources!). After a long reflection, my best guess is that the fly was smashed under the loose bifolium at the very time of composition, after it had unduly annoyed Mozart at work; he also provided a witty ‘service’ to the insect by marking a cross over it (‘requiescat’!); in any case, such was the force and determination of the action, combined with the gluing action of the ink, that the corpse is still stuck on the page after two hundred years of musicological investigations.” (p. 574)
More articles about Mozart are here.
Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Curiosities, Nature, Science, Source studies
Dal grammofono al lettore: Discografie ragionate
The Italian publisher L’Epos launched the series Dal grammofono al lettore: Discografie ragionate in 2009 to present annotated discographies that illustrate aspects of the history of sound recordings. The first book in the series, Bach Goldberg, Beethoven Diabelli by Carlo Fiore, illuminates the interpretation and reception histories of these two landmark sets of keyboard variations.
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Filed under Baroque era, Classic era, New series, Reception
Carlo Minasi
Carlo Minasi (1817–91) was a London-based pianist and concertina player who also taught both instruments, a prolific composer and arranger for the concertina and other instruments, the author of 21 instrumental tutors (13 for the concertina), and a talented inventor. He produced 42 albums of songs and tunes—22 for the English concertina, 10 for the German concertina, and 10 for general use—and he obtained patents on concertinas of his own design and on several specific improvements. He also patented improvements in firearm and furniture design, as well as one for a poultry incubator.
Despite his accomplishments, Minasi is not profiled in any of the standard music encyclopedias; as far as we know, the only comprehensive source for information about him is Randall C. Merris’s Carlo Minasi: Composer, arranger, and teacher, concertina and piano in Papers of the International Concertina Association volume 6 (2009), pp. 17–45.
Filed under Curiosities, Instruments, Romantic era
Musicworks
Thanks to funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Magazine Fund, the SOCAN Foundation Publications Assistance Program, and the Canada Periodical Fund, Musicworks has been issuing articles, reviews, and scores focusing on Canadian music since 1978; since 1983, issues have included sound recordings as well. While Canadian composers and performers are most often featured, the magazine also covers Canadian traditional music in both native and non-native cultures.
Recently Musicworks sent us a full run of their back issues; now we are confident that all of their articles are fully covered by RILM.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Music magazines, RILM news
Festschriften
Generally, Festschriften fall into three categories: memorial volumes, issued shortly after the death of the honoree, and often comprising personal tributes and reminiscences; commemorative volumes, published to honor some milestone in the deceased dedicatee’s life; and Festschriften proper, presented to a living recipient on the occaision of a birthday, anniversary, or transitional event. For more about this publication type, see the Preface to RILM’s Liber amicorum, the first volume in our retrospective Festschriften project.
Above is a reproduction of the frontispiece for Beethoven-Album: Ein Gedenkbuch dankbarer Liebe und Verehrung für den grossen Todten, a commemorative volume published in 1846; the book includes poems and compositions dedicated to the composer, including works by Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Czerny.
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Filed under Publication types, Romantic era
