History and Criticism of Music Research Papers (original) (raw)

The bilingual anthology "Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context" is the result of the 2016 international conference of the same name, held at the Austrian Society for Music in Vienna, which in turn was part of the three-year research project "Eduard Hanslickʼs Aesthetic Ideas, their Genesis, and their Place in the History of Ideas." It is focused on the intellectual background of Hanslick—a topic debated heatedly in Hanslick scholarship, which has scarcely been explored systematically. This anthology approaches the diversity of Hanslick's contexts from various disciplinary perspectives (musicology, philosophy, cultural history, music theory, music therapy, and art history), thereby fillingblind spots in Hanslick research. It consists of three parts, one analysing the contexts of Hanslick's classic treatise "On the Musically Beautiful" (OMB, 1854), one comprising close readings of this book, and one exploring general contexts of Hanslick's life and work: (1) Mark Evan Bonds and Alexander Wilfing analyse Hanslick's reliance on aesthetic precursors (Leibniz and Kantianism), Christoph Landerer examines Hanslick's education in law and its influence on his aesthetics, and Markéta Štědronská discusses Ambros's reformed appraisal of Hanslick's aesthetics in the 1870s. (2) The readings of OMB are concerned with Hanslick's concept of beauty (Thomas Grey), the precise nature of his arabesque metaphor (Manos Perrakis), his attitude towards performance (Anthony Pryer), his theory of the music theme and its effect on his evaluation of Brahms and Bruckner (Lee Rothfarb), and his ideas about non-absolute music and the music-text-relation (Nick Zangwill). (3) The articles on Hanslick's general contexts analyse his attitude towards religion (Nicole Grimes), his stances on the medical effects of music (Andrea Korenjak), his role as the first professor of musicology at Vienna University (Andrea Singer), and his relation to Rudolf von Eitelberger, founder of the Viennese School of Art History (Werner Telesko).

- by Alexander Wilfing and +1
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- Music Theory, Performance Studies, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Music

This final degree project has been aimed at investigating the influences that Franz Strauss exerted on his son Richard Strauss and, from the information found, learning better forms of trompistic interpretation for the works of both composers.
In order to achieve these objectives, we have first analysed biographical reviews and historical context of both composers to achieve knowledge about experiences, contacts, etc., that in some way could have influenced their compositional styles and the use they gave to the horn. After having studied that we provide information about the musical styles that characterize their compositions.

- by Joaquín Lamas Hermoso
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- Musical Composition, Music History, Music Theory, Musicology
- by David Corey
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- Music Criticism, Roger Scruton, History and Criticism of Music

Saggio per "Tosca" di G. Puccini, Fondazione Teatro Lirico di Cagliari – Stagione lirica e di balletto 2019. Regia, Pier Francesco Maestrini, Orchestra e Coro del Teatro lirico di Cagliari, dir. Donato Renzetti, m° del coro Donato Sivo,... more

Chapter 3 from Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives, (Routledge, 2014)

- by Thomas Grey
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- Music Aesthetics, Hanslick, Aesthetics (Music), History and Criticism of Music

Through the analysis of the correspondence belonging to the Massimo Mila Collection preserved in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel - in particular a selection of letters from the period 1928-1950 the essay focuses on the environments, contexts and friendship and professional relationships through which formed the intellectual matrices of Mila.
There are many unpublished passages cited, from letters from authors both in the musical and political history (for example: by Norberto Bobbio, Fedele d’Amico, Cesare Pavese, Ernesto Rossi, among others, and also by Mila himself). The essay is accompanied by a synoptic table of the periodic collaborations of the author.

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, History of Musicology, History of music

The paper contextualises Mila's thinking in the context of the rhetoric of the Resistance which for ideological reasons was affirmed in Italy between the Sixties and the Seventies. The argument takes place against the background of three relevant themes of the Italian musical debate of the time: the commitment of intellectuals, the relationship between music and society, the reception of Adorno's thought. The essay introduces the republishing, in the same issue of the review, of the article by Mila Capolavori per la Resistenza, published in the 1965 Espresso.

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, History of Musicology, History of music
- by Charissa Noble
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- Theology, Cultural Musicology, History and Criticism of Music

El estreno de La Bohème en el Teatro Real en 1900 fue determinante en el éxito de la música de Puccini entre el público madrileño de comienzos del siglo XX. La buena acogida de estrenos posteriores en dicho coliseo, como Tosca, contrasta con la firme oposición de la mayoría de la crítica de los diarios madrileños, partidaria de la producción wagneriana. Sin embargo, el estreno en Madrid de óperas como Tosca o Madama Butterfly, que llegaron al Teatro Real poco después de su estreno italiano en 1900 y 1904, generaron una expectación importante a pesar de la propaganda desfavorable de la crítica. Así, críticos como Manuel Manrique de Lara, Cecilio de Roda, Antonio Barrado, Manuel Salvador y Eduardo Muñoz, defensores de Wagner, se aliaron en una especie de cerco contra Puccini, que fue especialmente activo en la prensa de la primera década del siglo XX. En este artículo profundizamos en el discurso antipuccinista de los críticos de este periodo. Para ello, revisaremos las polémicas entre puccinistas y wagneristas a las que primero se refirió José Subirá. Esta investigación se incluye en el libro: Música y prensa: Crítica, Política y Propaganda, E. Encabo, ed. (Difácil, 2015).

- by Diana Díaz González
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- Music History, Wagner Studies, Puccini, Richard Wagner

Los artículos contenidos en este volumen estudian la vida musical en España a través de la relación entre prensa y asociacionismo en un período de tiempo que se extiende entre el primer tercio del siglo XIX y el primer tercio del siglo XX. La prensa se convierte así en la fuente fundamental a partir de la cual entender diferentes aspectos de la cultura y la sociedad a lo largo de un siglo. Repertorios y espacios de sociabilidad musical son analizados juntamente con otros elementos más ideológicos que son inseparables de los primeros. Como se muestra en las páginas de esta monografía, la prensa reprodujo descripciones subjetivas de la realidad estético-musical juntamente con narraciones que pretendían realizar descripciones objetivas de lo sucedido. Al nombrar esa realidad, críticos y periodistas actuaron sobre ella, creando identidades y reforzando clasificaciones y categorías con una gran fuerza simbólica que, en lo que se re!ere a la música, la historiografía posterior ha repetido a veces sin cuestionarse.

- by Carolina Queipo and +3
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- Sociology of Music, Historia política y social siglos XIX y XX, Sociología De La Música, History of the printing press

The late twentieth-century experimental music scene embraced many self-conscious pieces addressing critical cultural issues. Exemplifying this trend was composer Robert Ashley, whose opera for television Perfect Lives is an enactment of his theory of the “migration of consciousness in America,” a process he defines in three phases: linear, fragmented, and more fragmented but with new meanings. Ashley associates each stage with different patterns of speech and with Westward migration.
Ashley linked the first phase, European settlement on the East Coast, to a perception of life as a series of linear, causal events, and the self as a production of heritage and cultural identity. This phase is exemplified by the telling of commonly known anecdotes. The second phase, the present (metaphorically linked to the Midwest), is marked by clichés and aphorisms, which Ashley regarded as remnants of these now-forgotten anecdotes. Lacking connection to their original stories they eschew linearity and the teleological narrative, favoring instead personal experience. The third phase is in the near future, when Americans will assign new meanings to their fragments of worldview and similarly, fragments of speech will assume individualized meanings.
By focusing on one of the frequently used devices in the opera, the disembodied voice, this paper explicates ways in which the surface features of Ashley’s opera demonstrate his theory of “the migration of consciousness” on formal, experiential, and hermeneutical levels. The concept of the disembodied voice also marks many popular music videos, where it creates a sense of unity in the absence of linear narrative or causal events. Building on the work of Carol Vernallis, I will show how this aspect of Perfect Lives captures Ashley’s theory. Juxtaposing two seemingly disparate genres (opera and music video) also suggests a reconsideration of conventional genre categories and encourages an analogous negotiability of the lines between academic disciplines.

- by Charissa Noble
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- Music Video, Poststructuralism, Cultural Musicology, Critical and Cultural Theory
- by Samuel Llano
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- Comparative Literature, Spanish Literature, Music, Music History

Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”) remains up to today the fundamental text of modern European musical aesthetics. It is read and debated as a theory of musical autonomy, an argument for the internal and objective grounds of aesthetic value and meaning in Western art music, as against competing notions of expression, the imitation or representation of emotion (affect, feeling) as the grounds of musical value and meaning. This essay starts from the question as to whether the role of “beauty” in Hanslick’s argument, even re-defined as a “specifically musical” kind (“the musically beautiful”), is merely a vestige of Enlightenment-era aesthetics, up through Kant. Even from the older Enlightenment perspective, the concept of beauty could be considered essential to Hanslick’s arguments, in the sense that he is explaining music’s right to be considered among the “fine” (“beautiful”) arts. Because Kant’s ideas of beauty in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) remain a touchstone for in the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, these ideas are reviewed, not as direct influences on Hanslick but as a point of reference for understanding Hanslick’s “musically beautiful” in the context of Enlightenment and idealist aesthetic thought. Surveying then the rhetorical, philosophical, and concretely musical valences of “musical beauty” in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, I argue that the lasting impact of Hanslick’s book likes in its ability to engage with the arguments of philosophical aesthetics, while also problematizing these (whether purposefully or not) through the practical insights of a musician and critic. Hanslick’s attempts to locate musical beauty in the quality of thematic ideas and their deployment in overall design of a musical composition opens up his arguments to contingencies of historical change, cultural context, and a complex of subjective factors.
The remainder of the essay turns to the status of beauty as term of aesthetic judgement in Hanslick’s music criticism, especially in decade following the publication of the treatise. Modern musical beauty since the era of Viennese classicism is for Hanslick a continuing negotiation (I argue) between more-or-less stable values of pleasure in well-crafted melodic-harmonic designs, on one hand, and a shifting, inherently unstable admixture of Geist and Interesse, on the other: intellectual and technical challenges to the listener, in addition to pleasure in euphonious craftsmanship. Beethoven, above all the later music, becomes a paradigm of this problem, which Hanslick sees successfully negotiated in the music of Schumann and Mendelssohn (but not Wagner or Liszt), yet never to be solved definitively by any canon of classically “beautiful” music. The arguments of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen are already imbued to a significant extent with critical and historical understandings of musical beauty. Subsequent layers of historicizing commentary and examples that accrued over later editions of the text reinforce the factors of historical and subjective contingency that distinguished Hanslick’s arguments from more strictly philosophical conceptions of beauty in the first place.

- by Thomas Grey
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- Music Aesthetics, Music Criticism, Eduard Hanslick, History and Criticism of Music
- by Donna La Rue
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- Music, Music Education, Music History, Musicology
- by Marica Bottaro
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- Music Criticism, Italian Music, 19th Century (History), Spanish Music

This article presents a case study focusing on the archives of the Massimo Mila Collection housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle. Mila (1910-1988) was one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and an influential figure in Italian musical and cultural life. He was a music critic and historian, a multi-faceted and culturally engaged character. After a short profile of Mila and a description of his Collection, the article focuses on its most important part, namely the large amount of letters from over 600 correspondents, including musicians, painters, art and music critics, philosophers, historians, political activists, important members of the government, and numerous intellectuals from Italy and abroad. It is mostly unpublished material, with a few exceptions. My research selects all the letters that dates from 1928 to 1956, that is to say from Mila’s debut as a music critic when he was just eighteen, until around age forty-five, when he was already a well-known and established figure in the world of Italian culture. The rise of Fascism, the birth of the Republic and the first phase of reconstruction made this a period of immense upheaval for Italy and many other European nations.
The study aims to underline the immense potential of research carried out on the Massimo Mila Collection, as well as contribute to shedding further light on the wealth of interests and intellectual relationships of a figure who could quite simply be defined as “Mila the prismatic intellectual”.

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, History of Musicology, Critical Musicology

Este artículo pretende estudiar el modo en que las principales publicaciones periódicas editadas en Madrid a finales del siglo XVIII (1780-1800), contribuyeron a la construcción de un discurso sobre las cualidades de un buen cantante y un buen bailarín. En esta época la escritura acerca del teatro musical comienza a abrirse paso en los diarios, gracias a que los primeros «críticos» buscan las palabras adecuadas para describir las aptitudes de sus intérpretes, y los criterios correctos para enjuiciarlas con imparcialidad. Se asiste, en definitiva, a los inicios de la crítica musical, que en estas décadas solo atenderá a la música cuando esté al servicio de un texto literario. Para la realización de este trabajo, se propone una lectura y análisis de algunas de las fuentes hemerográficas más significativas al respecto.

Il 1950 è un anno di fondamentale importanza nel dibattito filmico-musicale italiano. A Firenze viene organizzato un grande congresso internazionale di musica interamente dedicato a questo argomento, all’interno delle manifestazioni del xiii Maggio Musicale Fiorentino e con il contributo determinante della Lux Film, la più grande casa di produzione cinematografica italiana dell’epoca. Proprio in occasione di questo grande evento, l’editore Bianco e Nero del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma pubblica, nella sua collana Quaderni della Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, un volume curato da Enzo Masetti intitolato La musica nel film, immediatamente ristampato come numero doppio dell’omonima rivista cinematografica: una significativa sinergia tra istituzioni culturali per alimentare il dibattito sul ‘problema’ dell’incontro tra queste due arti. Se il numero dei contributi di uomini di cinema è abbastanza esiguo (Blasetti, Serandrei, Cavazzuti), quello degli uomini provenienti dal fronte della musica appare davvero ampio e significativo. Sono pubblicati brevi scritti di compositori ben addentro al mondo di celluloide (Lavagnino, Gervasio, Vlad, Cicognini, Veretti e Rosati) e altri, più blasonati, solo occasionalmente impegnati nella scrittura filmico-musicale (Pizzetti, Petrassi, Malipiero, Tommasini). Anche gli specifici argomenti affrontati negli articoli appaiono sufficientemente differenziati: il neorealismo, il film musicale, il documentario, il disegno animato, la direzione orchestrale, la critica cinematografica e la registrazione del suono. Non manca, inoltre, uno sguardo al panorama internazionale, con focus specifici dedicati rispettivamente alla Francia (Gaillard), all’Inghilterra (Irving), agli Stati Uniti (Amfitheatrof) e all’Unione Sovietica (Chrennikov), e, infine, un breve articolo di Mario Verdone sulla sequenza cinematografica progettata da Alban Berg per la sua Lulu, nonché una corposa nota bibliografica sulla musica per film dello stesso studioso.

This essay examines the interactions between militant criticism and musicology in the production of historian and music critic Massimo Mila. The interactions are analyzed with respect to the idea of the role and function of the intellectual in society, in the context of a debate that already started in Italy in the first half of the century, and further developed after the Second World War, reaching its climax during the so-called "years of political commitment "(1965-1975).
The study of the relationship between Militant Criticism and Musicology is based on a comparative reading of Mila’s writings published in three periodicals, which have been selected for their representativeness and for the long-standing collaboration he had with them: a weekly magazine, "L’Espresso", a newspaper, "La Stampa", and a musicological review, "Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana".
The essay refers back to the author’s ethical-political intellectual matrices and examines the quality of the interactions between music criticism and musicology to bring into focus Mila’s critical methodology. The latter proceeds from the outside in, that is from the chronicle of contemporary phenomena (compositions, concerts, publications, events) – which involves a rigorous examination not only of the phenomena, but also of their effects on composers, musicians, critics and the public – to a reflection on the values exemplified by those phenomena. To give some examples, the essay tests Mila’s historicist thinking against the production of one of the most politically committed composers, Luigi Nono, considering the relationship between the intentions of composers and the public outcomes of their avantgarde compositions, as well as the heated debate that took place in Italy following the publication of some works by Adorno. The essay also identifies the category of “taste” as the common ground between the notions of “art” and “culture”, which Mila distinguishes, and the vantage point from which the author observes various trends in composition and problematizes works and musical phenomena. The result is an idea of music history as a history of compositional poetics explored through reception, and in this the author somehow anticipates the theory of Rezeptiongeschichte. What also emerges is Mila’s anachronistic position in the debate on political commitment, and hence a vision of musicology as not exclusively academic, but as having social and civil implications, since its aim is to raise awareness among readers and form their consciences – in this respect, musicology is always politically engaged.

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Music History, Music Criticism, History of Musicology, Critical Musicology
- by Joshua B Mailman
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- Applied Mathematics, Music, Music History, Music Theory

Con la consacrazione del cinema neorealista, il dibattito filmico-musicale italiano apre al confronto sul realismo, un concetto assai problematico nella storia del pensiero musicale. L’occasione è fornita da un grande congresso internazionale interamente dedicato alla musica per film, che si svolge a Firenze nel 1950, e da un volume monografico intitolato La musica nel film, pubblicato in occasione della manifestazione congressuale. Senza prendere minimamente in considerazione la possibilità di esercitare qualche forma di giudizio critico nei confronti delle musiche dei film neorealisti, i contributi alla questione articolano il concetto di realismo musicale nell’alveo di quegli elementi di teoria del cinema interessati a definire una funzione estetica della musica nel film. Se i contributi francesi rimangono nel recinto delle speculazioni puramente teoriche, gli italiani, invece, condizionati da un radicato antirealismo, orientano il discorso in funzione di una legittimazione di quegli aspetti della musica cinematografica relegati ad una marginalità non più compatibile con le istanze realistiche dei nuovi film del dopoguerra.

A required Master's Paper in Journalistic Ethics: The struggles of a music critic to realize "objectivity."

- by Claude Poux
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- Black Studies Or African American Studies, Ethics, Normative Ethics, Applied Ethics

« “Le jazz devant ses juges” : Critique du jazz dans la presse montréalaise de l’entre-deux-guerres », dans Espaces critiques. Écrire sur la littérature et les autres arts au Québec (1920-1960), sous la dir. Karine Cellard et Vincent... more

- by Sandria P. Bouliane
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- Jazz History, Québec Studies, History and Criticism of Music, Jazz Criticims
- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, History of music, Cultural History of Music

Resumo. Este artigo visa contribuir para a discussão sobre as necessárias mudanças no conceito, título e conteúdo das disciplinas “História da Música” e similares, destinadas ao aumento de sua eficiência no ensino musical da atualidade.... more

- by Paulo Castagna
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- Music, Music Education, Musicology, Art History

In Memoriam Mario Lavista

- by Carlos A Ponzio
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- History and Criticism of Music

1. Rifiutando l'ufficio di semplice traduttore; 2. Riscrivere lo stile; 3. Riscrivere l' «historia»: queste le articolazioni critiche del contributo, che parte dalla distinzione ciceroniana tra orator e interpres, di grande rilevanza nella teoria e pratica del vertere nel Cinquecento, e affronta l'analisi della riscrittura virgiliana in ottava rima, ovvero alla maniera dell'Ariosto, operata dal Dolce nell'Enea (1568) e nell'Achille e l'Enea (1570). Sta in: L. B. Il furto di Prometeo. Imitazione scrittura riscrittura nel Rinascimento. Edizioni Dell'Orso ALESSANDRIA 1990.
Vedi anche: G. Mazzacurati, M. Plaisance (eds.), Scritture di scritture. Testi, generi, modelli nel Rinascimento Bulzoni Editore, Ferrara, 1987.
Parole Chiave: Mimesis in literature; Italian literature > 16th century; French literature > 16th century; History and criticism; Letteratura italiana del Rinascimento; Imitazione e riscrittura nel Rinascimento; Il furto di Prometeo

Rozmowa o kondycji polskiej krytyki muzycznej w Internecie.

- by Filip Szałasek
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- Music Education, Musicology, New Media, Internet Studies

The special pragmatic communicative needs of journalistic reviews and program notes, in classical music contexts, can point to more general lessons for writing about music, including scholarly writing. The essay uses memoir to make more... more

- by Fred E Maus
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- Music, Music Theory, Musicology, Aesthetics
- by Fred E Maus
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- Music, Music Theory, Musicology, Aesthetics

Ensayo sobre música e Historia, pátinas sonoras (comparando versiones de óperas de Wagner y otros géneros musicales) y su relación con los efectos históricos, relacionados también con la estética cinematográfica de filmes de ambientación histórica y ficción fantástica. Perteneciente a la serie "Historia, épica y estética", publicada en el número de octubre 2004 de Noseolvida.com

- by Fiamma Nicolodi
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- Music Criticism, Italian Music, 19th Century Music, Music criticism/journalism

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Art, Music Criticism, History of Musicology