Being a music major can be a time-confusing, schedule-juggling experience. But for some music majors who know how to identify between energy leakage and productive activities, their college years as music majors have been one of the most rewarding experiences they ever had. At least, they can play music and choose to worry or not about grades. When one goes professional, though you play music, this time you will have to worry about earning a living! It is just a matter of choosing your activities, plotting a schedule, sticking to the schedule and enjoying every single minute of music making!
Beyond the Golden Age
‘How to be an emperor’: acting Alexander the Great in opera seria
Employing the example of Alexander the Great in opera seria, this essay reconsiders the performance of heroic roles in the 18th century. One of its aims is to extend our current understanding of Baroque gesture by taking seriously what contemporary acting tutors and treatises say: a complete performance is possible only after careful study of gesture in painting and statuary. An examination of Alexander iconography suggests both specific tactics for the singer, director and designer; and, more importantly, a broader agenda: the representation of Alexander’s essential grandeur. A second goal is to determine to what extent our performances today of Alexander and other operatic heroes can be shaped by comprehension of their significance and meanings for those who created and consumed heroic art in the 18th century. These heroes were (and are) not interchangeable, not simply emblems, but rather, individuals whose stories conjured up a host of resonances specific to each. We might portray them accordingly. Finally, the article explores some of the aesthetic and philosophical questions raised by this kind of historical approach.
Ockeghem, Brumel, Josquin: new documents in Troyes
On the richly travelled medieval road from Paris to Lyon, the city of Troyes, in Champagne, was probably the most important stop. The town was a major administrative and religious centre: it boasted a cathedral, several collegiate churches (at one of which, St John’s, King Henry V of England married Catherine of Valois in 1421) and a great number of parish churches.
The rich archives of these various establishments are kept today in the Archives départementales de l’Aube at Troyes, but do not appear to have been scrutinized by music historians since the appearance, more than 100 years ago, of Abbé Arthur Prévost’s Histoire de la maîtrise de la cathédrale de Troyes (1905). Renewed examination in the summer of 2006 has brought to light several documents of more than passing interest to the history of music.
Johannes Ockeghem held a canonry in absentia at Troyes Cathedral between 1457 and 1467, though it seems that the chapter was not especially happy to be able to count the composer among their number, and was looking for ways to encourage him to resign. Josquin visited Troyes on at least two occasions, in 1499 and 1501, and Antoine Brumel had done the same in 1497. There is reason to believe that these visits were more than overnight lodgings en route to other destinations. There appears to have been a tradition of singers’ meetings in the residence of the choirmaster of Troyes Cathedral—meetings of the kind that must have prompted, at much earlier dates, the composition of works like Compère’s Omnium bonorum plena and Josquin’s Illibata Dei virgo nutrix.
A musical fragment from Anglo-Saxon England
This article argues that a neume fragment found in the famous ‘Durham Cassiodorus’ (Durham, Cathedral Library, Ms.b.ii.30) may date from the first half of the 8th century. As part of this argument, I suggest the possibility of notated music in Anglo-Saxon England prior to the 10th century. Since the Durham Cassiodorus was likely read by Alcuin of York who played an important part in the Carolingian liturgical reform, the Durham Cassiodorus neume fragment may be linked to Alcuin and to what Kenneth Levy has called a ‘Carolingian archetype’, that is, a now-lost antiphoner with music compiled around 800. Other unreported English neume fragments found in the 8th-century ‘Tiberius Bede’ (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius c.ii) are presented here.
Pleyel’s ‘London’ symphonies
Evidence of provenance and bibliographic features suggest that three autograph symphonies of Ignace Pleyel from the collection of the Royal Philharmonic Society in the British Library are the works he composed in London in 1792, when he was engaged by the Professional Concert as a rival to Haydn in the latter’s appearances for Salomon. Details of their performance in the succeeding decade support the case. In the E symphony Pleyel anticipates features later used by Haydn in his symphony no.103.
A newly discovered source of vocal chamber music by Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and Rene Drouard de Bousset
This article introduces a newly discovered manuscript dated 1760 (which is the property of the author) of the sacred cantatas of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and René Drouard de Bousset, which had been published earlier in the 18th century. As the only known secondary source of La Guerre’s cantatas, the variant readings between the printed and manuscript versions are discussed, and the fine, but little-known, cantatas of De Bousset are surveyed. The late copy date is remarkable, for it is generally considered that the French sacred cantata repertory fell out of favour by c.1745–50 at the latest. The author suggests that the writings of Titon du Tillet (including Le Parnasse François (Paris, 1732)), Daquin and others contributed to an ongoing interest, amongst select circles, in the repertory of the ‘ancien musique’ well into the 1760s. Musical examples are included, both in facsimile and modern transcriptions, as well as a Critical Commentary giving the most significant differences between the manuscript and printed versions of La Guerre’s cantatas. The illustrations include photographs of the manuscript itself, and various engraved portraits from Titon du Tillet’s Parnasse François, including that of La Guerre.
A mangled chime: the accidental death of the opera libretto in Civil War England
Early 17th-century English lute song represents a perfect fusion of words and music, simultaneously conceived by poets and composers with a deep instinctive understanding of each other’s business. This is a critical commonplace with heavy implications for performers. To avoid distracting attention away from the words, musical settings were kept as simple as possible. To facilitate simple strophic setting the poets made sure that each stanza of a multi-stanza poem followed the same metrical scheme, and they naturally assumed that composers would follow it too. The Golden Age achievement relied on collective self-restraint (not too much self-expression or ‘interpretation’ therefore); and when Henry Lawes and other cavalier composers of masque songs and masque-inspired opera abandoned that restraint the Golden Age was over. Henry Purcell had to start again from scratch. Little of this turns out to be true. ‘A mangled chime’ looks again at the relationship between words and music in 17th-century England, suggesting a more complicated system of interplay between the two. Compositional technique was a mystery to most lyricists even at the height of the Golden Age, and as the century unfolded they found words matching the formal ambitions of contemporary theatre composers harder and harder to write. By 1680–90 (the decade of Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas) the result was a peculiarly English approach to word-setting in which musical sound, though it echoed poetical sense, frequently obliterated poetic structure; a theory of English opera thoroughly confused in its aesthetic aims; and (in consequence) an uncoordinated response to opera seria when the Italian invasion began soon afterwards. Because Golden Age reserve inhibited frank negotiation between composers and poets it masked the composers’ textual needs in dramatic rather than lyrical situations and it led—via hugely resourceful but non-confrontational Lawes—to the overthrow of native English opera a century later.
The uses of lute song: texts, contexts and pretexts for ‘historically informed’ performance
Because English solo songs from the Golden Age period (c.1600–20) are chiefly familiar from printed books clearly intended for domestic use, modern scholars and performers have tended to assume that composers had the literary interests, practical needs and technical limitations of upper-class amateurs in mind right from the start of the creative process. According to this view, lute ayres are the musical equivalents of early 17th-century miniature portraits: objets d’art for personal contemplation (the self-accompanying singer) or special sharing with special friends. This article explores the lute song repertory from a different angle, as the domesticated tip of a professional and (at the time) a publicly appreciable iceberg much of which melted away with the professional performers originally responsible for its semi-improvisatory effectiveness. The manuscript Oxford, Christ Church Mus.439 is studied in particular—a source with probable professional provenance, preserving some highly ornamented versions of songs now much better known in their plainer printed versions and (at the other extreme) some songs from which the fully written-out lute parts familiar from the printed books have been removed. What sorts of alternative were improvised in their place? While lute song publishers assumed a ‘minimalist aesthetic’ and sensibly encouraged their customers to do the same, lute song composers were aware of other possibilities and those with a theatrical leaning (Campion, Rosseter, Johnson, for instance) might even have preferred them. Today’s historically informed performers have a wider range of interpretative choice legitimately open to them than perhaps they realize.
Period polemics
From ‘early’ to ‘modern’ music
Songs and sources
Instruments and images
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