Nineteenth-Century Music Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- Latin American Studies, Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Venezuela

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. For if this age understood time, it was through a melody.
This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

- by Benedict Taylor
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- Metaphysics of Time, Nineteenth-Century Music, Russian Music, Memory Studies

In this anniversary year, many orchestras saturate their seasons with Beethoven's complete symphonies. The University of Kansas' 2020 Beethoven Cycle, by contrast, features two "unheard" symphonies of Beethoven, each comprising four movements in the classical format, with one movement selected from each of the first eight symphonies. This article discusses the surprising cohesiveness and organicity of the two "new" works and shows that they recreate sensibilities of the early nineteenth century. By embracing the flexible performance expectations of Beethoven's contemporaries, our symphonic experiment offers an alternative to encyclopedic presentations of museum "masterpieces," which largely resulted from Romantic and modernist aesthetics.

- by Carolyn Watson
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- Orchestral Conducting, Nineteenth-Century Music, Beethoven, Orchestral Composition
- by Luminita Florea
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- Music History, Nineteenth-Century Music, History of music
- by Nathalie Hérold
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- Music, Musical Composition, Music History, Piano
- by Franjo Ksaver Kuhač
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Dance, Nationalism in Music, Kolo

Fromental Halévy’s five-act grand opera premiered in Paris in 1841. Many critics viewed the work as a great success and seen as a true rival to (1835). Wagner, who was in Paris at the time, even went so far as to claim the composition ‘a new step forward’ in the world of opera, evidenced in the many review articles and publications he wrote about the work. This article attempts to uncover what Wagner admired about Halévy’s composition, especially within the context of the German composer’s ‘artistic exile’ in France (1839–1842) and the completion of a new dramatic conception of German romantic opera in <Der Fliegende Holländer> (1843). The connections between the two works are explored, revealing an affinity for the exile and the desire for female redemption.

- by Mark A. Pottinger
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- Romanticism, Opera, Nineteenth-Century Music, Richard Wagner

Gissing in Vogue. Ed. Tom Ue. The Gissing Journal 54.4 (Supplement to Oct. 2020): 32-33. Print.

The last of Felix Mendelssohn’s series of popular and influential concert overtures, the Overture to the Tale of the Fair Melusina of 1835 remains the least familiar of these works. It is also the most unusual with regard to formal design in its purposeful confounding of introduction and sonata-form elements alongside the dialogic relation of clearly gendered thematic materials. Such calculated ‘deformation’ of classic and early Romantic sonata form has been understood as a means of generating a kind of musical-narrative content, though the precise relation of formal experiment to such narrative content has remained elusive. This chapter reconsiders the problematic relation of experimental formal procedure to the narrative dimension and the role this may have played in the composer’s subsequent abandonment of the quasi-programmatic concert overture genre, despite his unparalleled artistic success in the field
Keywords: Felix Mendelssohn, Die schöne Melusine, sonata form, Sonata Theory, musical narrative, programme music, deformation

This study investigates a large-scale community project that called for a long preparation period and involved over 100 participants. The researchers were interested in the contributory factors that led participants and leaders to commit and persevere with the project, for which there were two years of planning and five months of rehearsals. The project related a suppressed wartime history and had reenactment aspects. Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis methodology was used in order to engage participants in sharing their lived experiences. Through focus group sessions, a theme of restoration emerged, among other themes that are frequently expressed in community music groups, such as social and emotional well-being. A deep emotional engagement with the project centered on historical restoration which aligned with personal restoration experiences. Restoration was closely linked to storytelling and three other themes of personal growth; connections; and self-discovery/journey. In light of this theme and the historical basis for the community project, the researchers chose to examine the findings through the lens of historical nostalgia.

- by Helen English and +1
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- Music Education, Nineteenth-Century Music, Community Music, Australian Music
- by Marten Noorduin
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- Music, Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Violin sonatas

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) was Victorian Britain’s most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan’s reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for scholarly re-engagement with Sullivan. The present book offers a new appraisal of the music of this most notable nineteenth-century British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social context to his work. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most important serious works – the music to The Tempest, the ‘Irish’ Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe – alongside detailed examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S. Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan’s musical achievement.

What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible - or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.

- by Gavin Williams
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- Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Nineteenth Century Studies, Sound studies
- by Tom Moore
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- Music History, Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Historical Musicology

This is the General Introduction to Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, edited by Patrick Spedding and Paul Watt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 1.1–11. The songbooks of the 1830-40s, reprinted in this collection, were printed in tiny numbers, and small format so they could be hidden in a pocket, passed round or thrown away. Collectors have long sought 'these priceless chapbooks', but only recently a collection of 49 songbooks — containing over eleven hundred songs — has come to light. This collection represents almost all of the known songbooks from the period. The songbooks are rich in flash language, cant and slang; containing, among other things, the earliest known use of the word "fanny" with its modern, obscene, meaning. [For more on the history of the obscene meaning of the word Fanny, see my "Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy" (2011)]

- by Patrick Spedding and +1
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- Music History, Print Culture, Nineteenth-Century Music, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture

El dosier: Música en la Cuba Colonial, publicado en la revista Clave (Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Música Cubana, año 17, num. 1, 2015) se compone de la selección de una muestra de trabajos que ejemplifican los resultados de algunas de estas temáticas de investigación; que parten del análisis de fuentes documentales procedentes fundamentalmente de archivos y de la prensa periódica y que abordan estudios monográficos, como los dedicados a Cayetano Pagueras y Laureano Fuentes; relaciones de contexto social y creación musical en el par músicos criollos versus músicos peninsulares, y espacios musicales como el de la iglesia, el teatro, el salón y las sociedades de La Habana, Santiago de Cuba y Holguín en el siglo xix. Todo ello, a manera de pincelada de la música de Cuba en el período colonial, una historia que se ha de reescribir a la luz de estos nuevos hallazgos.

- by Miriam Escudero Suastegui and +2
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- Latin American Studies, Music, Musicology, Nineteenth Century Studies

It has long been a truism of music criticism that nineteenth-century Russian symphonic music lacks a true sense of development when compared with a normative German model. This article puts forward an alternative way of approaching Russian instrumental music, from the perspective of a different conception of musical and historical time. By interrogating both musically and culturally this idea of temporality, the article suggests a potential distinction between a specifically Western model of time and historical progress - marked by the qualities of onward teleological process and the capacity for organic development, as celebrated in the archetypal Beethovenian symphonic style - and a static, cyclical, repetitive, even timeless conception that may be seen to apply more aptly to several pieces of the nineteenth-century Russian repertory. Yet this neat binary opposition created between East and West is seen to be overly simplistic for many pieces that fall outside the small group of high-profile nationalist works from the Kuchka. The article ultimately argues for a richer understanding of music’s relation with time within both Russian and Austro-German traditions

- by Ewa Hauptman-Fischer
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- Opera, Nineteenth-Century Music, Musicology: source studies, Polish Opera
- by Virginia Sánchez López
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- War Studies, Ideology, Music and Politics, Nineteenth-Century Music
- by Edward Klorman
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Musical Form, Carl Maria von Weber

An analysis combining partimento and schemata theory with formal functions and others.

- by Manel Ribera
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- Musical Composition, Music Theory, Composition and Rhetoric, Schumann
- by Derek K . Remeš
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- Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory, Nineteenth-Century Music, Piano Music

The article discusses Richard Wagner’s last music-drama, which today is the traditional Good Friday “opera” in New York, Vienna, and other venues around the globe. I argue that Parsifal utilizes traditional Christian symbols and thereby transforms them, in order to help transform the world of the audience. The first part of the article summarizes the dramatic conflict and analyzes how the work appropriates the Christian
symbolism of the Lord’s Supper. I also look at Wagner’s essay “Religion and Art,” which was written during the composition of Parsifal and presents an ethical critique of Christianity in the name of “true religion.” The second part of the article presents two assessments of Parsifal, both of which acknowledge its inherent religious symbolism but come to different conclusions regarding its significance (Christian versus atheistic). The third part of the article offers an alternative interpretation and implies trajectories for further research.

- by Matthias Gockel
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Music And Religion, Theology and Music, Richard Wagner

Robert Schumann's relationship with the Letters has been widely recognized, and his early interest in the connections between literature and music has lasted his entire life. For him, music and literature were not separate, but were different facets of the same transforming agent: art, whose function is to convert the prosaic of existence into poetry, understood in a broad sense, applicable to all vital aspects. Through his own writings, this paper reviews the profound relationship between the composer and literature, from childhood to his last years, remarking the early, and lasting, influence of his favorite writer, Jean Paul.

The subject of this study is the dramaturgical and musical means used in the "scene of madness" in the opera "Boris Godunov", composed by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Модест Петрович Мусоргский). The opera has two editorial offices, the first composed in 1869 and premiered in 1929, while the second one was composed in 1872 and premiered in 1874. At the time of its creation, the Mussorgsky defined the genre of this opera as a “four-act musical work”, which more precisely indicated the peculiarity of the piece both in relation to Pushkin's tragedy and also in relation to musical works. By avoiding words such as opera, plot, drama, the composer deliberately sought to avoid associations with the governing stereotypes in the operatic romantic spectacle.

- by Pavle Soleša
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- Music History, Music Theory, Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music
- by Benedict Taylor
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- Music Aesthetics, Nineteenth-Century Music, Music and Society, Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony is something of a problem-piece – biographically for the composer, historiographically in terms of its later reception, and above all aesthetically for our attempts at situating it within the traditional categories of musical criticism. To compound the issue, Mendelssohn’s actual composition is by no means an inconsiderable achievement; to put it bluntly, a very fine work seems to be hiding here within the melange of confused aesthetic criteria and reception history that surrounds it. Most fundamentally, the problem boils down to the symphony’s relationship with an aesthetic dispute concerning the relative status of absolute and programmatic music. This debate is not merely an ‘extramusical’ discourse but is in fact exemplified by the very musical materials used by Mendelssohn, specifically the use of pre-existent or cyclic themes within this symphony and its expressive succession of movements. The present study builds upon research concerning Mendelssohn’s relation to programmatic aesthetics and one of their most significant proponents, A.B. Marx, to explore this work at a deeper analytical level, suggesting finally the complex equipoise this symphony holds between rival aesthetic camps and the implications for our understanding of the music.

- by Benedict Taylor
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Program Music

The article reviews the evidence relating to Bellini’s knowledge of Viennese classical music, from
the years of his training to his last stay in Paris. The material examined includes documents that are already
known and others that are little or not known. Among these, the transcription, made in Naples around 1824,
of a piece from Mozart’s cantata Davide pentito, and the fragments of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s sonatas found
in the Bellini’s working papers (‘studi giornalieri’) used in Paris in 1834-35. A further piece sheds possible
new light on the relationship between Bellini and Chopin. In light of the facts examined, the article concludes
that the stay in Paris was an opportunity for Bellini to enrich a path of knowledge characterized by constant
curiosity towards new experiences.

- by Fabrizio Della Seta
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Mozart, Beethoven, Frederic Chopin
- by Sara Vitacca
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- Romanticism, Nineteenth Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Music, Greek Myth
- by Duncan Bell
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- British Literature, History, Intellectual History, Cultural History
- by myriam pias
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- Nineteenth-Century Music, Women Composers And Musicians, Piano Music

The fifteen operas of Russian composer César Antonovich Cui (1835-1918) heretofore have never been addressed in a comprehensive fashion. For the first time this study analyzes together Cui's six full-length operas (Prisoner of the Caucasus, William Ratcliff, Angelo, Le Flibustier, The Saracen, and The Captain's Daughter) and his shorter stage works (a comedy, one-act tragedies, and children's operas). Using evidence in printed sources, it examines their musico-dramatic features within the context of the conditions under which they were composed and performed. These conditions include the reception accorded them and their relation to the works of Cui's contemporaries and to his own operatic ideals. Several indications of likely influences from other models or genres have been posited or identified in such figures ranging from Meyerbeer to Balakirev, as have likely exchanges of musical ideas between Cui and other composers, especially Rimsky-Korsakov. This study shows that Cui and his operas maintained a persistent, if not pervasive, position in the musical life of the era, and that to a certain extent his works bore relation to contemporaneous historical events and political circumstances. His position is both enriched and complicated by his intense and polemical activity in music journalism, wherein among other things he promoted the esthetic ideals of his circle and advocated for the works of Russian composers. The study uncovers, and at times reinterprets, the problematic and interesting aspects of Cui's musico-dramatic style — which incorporated certain stylistic features characteristic of Russian art music — in recognition of his avoidance of Russian subjects (except primarily Pushkin). These factors are intertwined with the shifting tastes of his Russian audience, for whom most of the operas were composed. As this study demonstrates, Cui's primary operatic achievements lie in being the first member of the "mighty handful" to have an opera performed (William Ratcliff); being the first of them to have an opera performed in the West (Prisoner of the Caucasus) and the first Russian to premiere an opera in Paris (Le Flibustier); completion of Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest (with Rimsky-Korsakov) and Musorgsky's Fair at Sorochintsy; and his considerable contribution to the repertory of children's opera in Russia.

- by Lyle K Neff
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- Heinrich Heine, Nineteenth-Century Music, Russian Music, Russian Opera

A documentary chronicle of the Bulgarian traditional music at the First Bulgarian Fair in Plovdiv in 1892.

- by Svetlina Denova
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- Folklore, Anthropology of Music, Ethnomusicology, Nineteenth Century Studies

Collects and analyzes data [shortly to be posted] showing instances of Scots-song borrowing in composition, looking at the contributions of visiting pianists to London and their role in spreading London trends in Scottish tunes to the... more

- by Maria Welna
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- Musicology, Piano, Nineteenth-Century Music, Performance Practice

Beethoven’s tempo indications have been the subject of much scholarly debate, but a coherent understanding of his intended tempos has not yet emerged. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, some of the discussion has been based on unreliable sources, or an unrepresentative sample of sources. Secondly, the substantial differences between tempo preferences in the early nineteenth century and now has made these tempo indications difficult to approach for musicians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thirdly, discussions of Beethoven’s tempo have typically focussed on works in one particular genre. This thesis overcomes these limitations by incorporating all of Beethoven’s works, and rooting the whole research in a wide variety of sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth century that have a plausible relationship with Beethoven’s practice. In particular the metronome marks by Beethoven, as well as those from his close contemporaries Carl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, and Karl Holz, provide great insight into the composer’s sense of tempo. By using as many sources on Beethoven’s tempo as possible, this approach makes reasonable estimations of the actual speeds that Beethoven had in mind for his works. Furthermore, it also allows an exploration of the musical intuitions that are the root cause of these speeds.

- by Marten Noorduin
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- Performance Studies, Nineteenth-Century Music, Beethoven, Performance Practice

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

- by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
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- Cultural History, Music, Music History, Musicology

This paper (written in Albanian) aims to be a modest contribution in the history of Albanian music, namely as regards the beginning of the Western notation system. It is about an English edition of the year 1804 (“Lyric Airs by Edward Jones, consisting of Specimens of Greek, Albanian, Walachian, Turkish, Arabian, Persian, Chinese, and Moorish National Songs and Melodies”), where popular lyric airs from Balkan and Eastern peoples are
included. The Pyrrhic dance is included there, among other tunes.
This was the first presentation in notes for this dance. The importance of this book
is great, because it contains data not only about its origin, but also its melodic line is presented there. Its place in a music anthology with airs from peoples of the region is not only an identification effort, but also a classification tentative in the Balkan cultural group, and further, in the Eastern culture. This implicit classification reflects the perception of the foreign musicologists and scholars about the music patterns of the region. .

- by Majlinda Spiro
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- Music History, Musicology, Folklore, Albanian Studies
- by Christopher Wiley
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- Music, Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music, Twentieth-century Music
- by Céline Frigau Manning
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- Theatre Studies, Reception Studies, Theatre History, Italian Studies

Throughout the history of Western music, musicians have almost invariably discussed the keyboard fugue and other extreme forms of polyphony as signs of something that transcends human subjectivity. Despite the persistence of this critical topos, musicians shifted their approach to it around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shift involved both a change in the technique of counterpoint and a change in the way counterpoint was interpreted. Composers sought to invest the fugue with a new dramatic and teleological thrust suitable to modern times, and critically minded musicians changed their interpretive method so as to emphasize the passage of time. Whereas musicians of the early eighteenth century read counterpoint and the fugue allegorically and annulled time through the conceptual precision of the allegorical image, musicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries read the fugue symbolically and worked time into their interpretive process. In both eras, the practice of interpretation coincided with and affected the reading of the genre's temporality.

- by Keith Chapin
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- Schumann, Nineteenth-Century Music, Allegory, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy