Abstract How did Renaissance composers write their music? In this revolutionary look at a subject that has fascinated scholars for years, musicologist Jessie Ann Owens offers new and striking evidence that contrary to accepted theory, sixteenth-century composers did not use scores to compose--even to write complex vocal polyphony.L L Drawing on sources that include contemporary theoretical treatises, documents and letters, iconographical evidence, actual fragments of composing slates, and numerous sketches, drafts, and corrected autograph manuscripts, Owens carefully reconstructs the step-by-step process by which composers between 1450 and 1600 composed their music. The manuscript evidence--autographs of more than thirty composers--shows the stages of work on a wide variety of music--instrumental and vocal, sacred and secular--from across most of Renaissance Europe. Her research demonstrates that instead of working in full score, Renaissance composers fashioned the music in parts, often working with brief segments, according to a linear conception. The importance of this discovery on editorial interpretation and on performance cannot be overstated.L Lhe book opens with a broad picture of what has been known about Renaissance composition. From there, Owens examines the teaching of composition and the ways in which musicians and composers both read and wrote music. She also considers evidence for composition that occurred independent of writing, such as composing “in the mind “ or composing with instruments. In chapters on the manuscript evidence, she establishes a typology both of the sources themselves and of their contents (sketches, drafts, fair copies). She concludes with case studies detailing the working methods of Francesco Corteccia, Henricus Isaac, Cipriano de Rore, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.L L This book will change the way we analyze and understand early music. Clear, provocative, and painstakingly researched, Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 makes essential reading for scholars of Renaissance music as well as those working in related fields such as sketch studies and music theory.
Abstract In The Composer as Intellectual, musicologist Jane Fulcher reveals the extent to which leading French composers between the world wars were not only aware of, but engaged intellectually and creatively with the central political and ideological issues of the period. Employing recent sociological and historical insights, she demonstrates the extent to which composers, particularly those in Paris since the Dreyfus Affair, considered themselves and were considered to be intellectuals, and interacted closely with intellectuals in other fields. Their consciousness raised by the First World War and the xenophobic nationalism of official culture, some joined parties or movements, allying themselves with and propagating different sets of cultural and political-social goals. Fulcher shows how these composers furthered their ideals through the specific language and means of their art, rejecting the dominant cultural exclusions or constraints of conservative postwar institutions and creatively translating their cultural values into terms of form and style. This was not only the case with Debussy in wartime, but with Ravel in the twenties, when he became a socialist and unequivocally refused to espouse a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. It was also the case with the group called “Les Six,” who responded culturally in the twenties and then politically in the thirties, when most of them supported the programs of the Popular Front. Others could not be enthusiastic about the latter and, largely excluded from official culture, sought out more compatible movements or returned to the Catholic Church. Like many French Catholics, they faced the crisis of Catholicism in the thirties when the church not only supported Franco, but Mussolin’s imperialistic aggression in Ethiopia. While Poulenc embraced traditional Catholicism, Messiaen turned to more progressive Catholic movements that embraced modern art and insisted that religion must cross national and racial boundaries. Fulcher demonstrates how closely music had become a field of clashing ideologies in this period. She shows also how certain French composers responded, and how their responses influenced specific aspects of their professional and stylistic development. She thus argues that, from this perspective, we can not only better understand specific aspects of the stylistic evolution of these composers, but also perceive the role that their art played in the ideological battles and in heightening cultural-political awareness of their time.
Modernism often appears as a movement of individual iconoclasts: the visionary Pablo Picasso, the aloof Gertrude Stein, the isolated Charles Ives, among others. Often overlooked are the various groups that supported modernist styles during the early decades of the century. Collective organization especially shaped the production of new music, as many composers realized the necessity of solidarity in confronting the increased marginalization of their works. This awareness led to the formation of such composers' groups as the Verein ffir musikalische Privatauffiihrungen and Les Six. Although the two differ in many respects, they, along with most other groups, shared a commitment to providing members with much needed creative support and performances.' Responding to the same needs, several modern music societies arose in the United States, notably the International Composers' Guild (1921-27), Pro-Musica (1920-44), Henry Cowell's New Music Society (1925-36), the Pan American Association of Composers (1928-34), and the League of Composers (1923-54).2 This article discusses the formation of the League and traces its activities in New York City through the 1920s. During that decade modernist styles, which had previously made only sporadic appearances in the New York concert scene, bounded into the city's music world. The League was a major force in the promotion of modern music. The organization's role in that effort can be best appreciated by describing its ventures inside and outside of the concert hall and by comparing it to its chief rival, the In-
Abstract This book is about composer biographies in the likes of Amadeus, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Swanee River, and Rhapsody in Blue. Even before movies had sound, filmmakers dramatized the lives of composers. Movie biographies—or biopics—have depicted composers as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin. This book surveys different styles and periods from the Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s to the international cinema of today, exploring the role that film biographies play in our understanding of history and culture. It delves into such questions as: How historically accurate are composer biopics? How and why have inaccuracies and distortions been perpetrated? What strategies have been used to represent visually the creative process? The book examines the films in several contexts and considers their role in commodifying and popularizing music.
This study investigated the possibility that musical composers can reliably convey distinct and definable emotional qualities through pitch, temporal and loudness information contained in a musical score. Five musical composers were provided with a list of six terms relating to emotional states. The terms were: joy, sorrow, excitement, dullness, anger and peace. Each composer was asked to compose short melodies embodying the emotional qualities described by the six terms. Fourteen listeners were played the melodies, and were asked to provide judgments relating to their emotional quality. Melodies were judged to embody the emotional quality intended to be conveyed. Unintended emotional qualities were judged to be present in melodies in varying degrees. The notion that emotional qualities can be effectively conveyed through music is discussed.
A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other questions, readers need only consult the Invecticon at the back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in all its vituperation. Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bulow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves-or hates -classical music. With a new foreword by Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach).
In this study I promote a view of children's aesthetic decision-making as a non-verbal process evidenced in the structural features children employ in their musical discourse as composers. I draw on the work of Polanyi and Wittgenstein to support the view that knowledge may be demonstrated as well as ‘stated’ verbally, and that the examination of children's musical discourse as composers provides us with direct access to their musical thinking and aesthetic decision-making. Through the analysis of the form and structure of one hundred and thirty-seven compositions collected from children aged between five and twelve years children's aesthetic decision-making is identified and described. Findings of the study suggest that children's aesthetic decisionmaking as demonstrated in their use of structure and form in their musical discourse as composers is not necessarily linked to age or prior experience.
The process of musical creation was investigated through a series of semistructured interviews with eight professional composers of classical music. For these eight composers, 12.1 years was the average chronological age when they composed their first work. For the majority of composers, the first composition was a song or melody. The composing process frequently involved first discovering a “germinal idea.” A brief sketch of the germinal idea was often recorded, followed by a first draft of the work, elaboration and refinement of the first draft, and then completion of the final draft and copying of the score. Compositional activity seems to occur most frequently in association with feelings of tranquility, security, and relaxation. Suggestions are presented for future research on the act of musical creation.
With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.
Composers generally write music alone, and we commonly understand the great figures of classical music as singular geniuses. Even where composers’ social networks and friendships are of contextual interest, it is arguable that their association with other musicians arises because they choose to socialize with similar others. However, it is also possible that creative work, even for artists as solitary as composers, depends significantly on interaction and collaboration. Certain periods and places are considered hotspots of creativity where new musical ideas are shared and movements arise. In this paper we consider the case of British classical composition, both as an example of a music network, and to contribute to debates in music history.
This chapter examines the existence of a watershed in Western art music located in the decades around 1800. In parallel with the emergence of a modern work-concept, the general public accepted, for the first time, a composer-centred (rather than genre-centred or performer-centred) view of music — a perspective previously associated with practitioners, patrons and connoisseurs. The chapter considers the relevance of composer-centredness to the work-concept and analyses Lydia Goehr's views on the work-concept as detailed in her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. According to Goehr, musical work enters its imaginary museum only because composers have already entered their imaginary Pantheon.
The second half of the fifteenth century saw profound changes in the understanding and valuation of the concepts of "composer" and "composition." This article explores those changes, especially as they evolved in urban musical culture in the Low Countries in 1450-1500. Attention is given to oral traditions of popular and professional polyphony, the status of writing in musical instruction and practice, the emergence of a perceived opposition between "composition" and "improvisation," the technical and conceptual ramifications of that perception, the relative social and professional status implied in designations such as "singer," "composer," "musicus," and "tenorist," and, finally, the new understanding and valuation of musical authorship, around 1500, involving notions of personal style, artistic freedom, authorial intention, creative property, historical awareness, and professional organization, protection, and secrecy.
In the new edition of this highly successful book, Harold Schonberg traces the consecutive line of composers from Monteverdi to the tonalists of the 1990s through a series of fascinating biographical chapters. Music is a continually evolving art, and there have been no geniuses, however great, who have not been influenced by their predecessors. The great composers are here presented as human beings who lived and related to the real world. All of the important figures - Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, and many others - are included, their lives woven into a fabric rich in detail and anecdote. For this new edition, Schonberg has extended the book's coverage with informative and astute descriptions of later composers. What has not been changed is the character of the book, which remains an object of delight to all music lovers.
In the 1960s, rock and pop music recording questioned the convention that recordings should recreate the illusion of a concert hall setting. The Wall of Sound that Phil Spector built behind various artists and the intricate eclecticism of George Martin's recordings of the Beatles did not resemble live performances -- in the Albert Hall or elsewhere -- but instead created a new sonic world. The role of the record producer, writes Virgil Moorefield in The Producer as Composer, was evolving from that of organizer to auteur; band members became actors in what Frank Zappa called a movie for your ears. In rock and pop, in the absence of a notated score, the recorded version of a song -- created by the producer in collaboration with the musicians -- became the definitive version. Moorefield, a musician and producer himself, traces this evolution with detailed discussions of works by producers and producer-musicians including Spector and Martin, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Trent Reznor, Quincy Jones, and the Chemical Brothers. Underlying the transformation, Moorefield writes, is technological development: new techniques -- tape editing, overdubbing, compression -- and, in the last ten years, inexpensive digital recording equipment that allows artists to become their own producers. What began when rock and pop producers reinvented themselves in the 1960s has continued; Moorefield describes the importance of disco, hip-hop, remixing, and other forms of electronic music production in shaping the sound of contemporary pop. He discusses the making of Pet Sounds and the production of tracks by Public Enemy with equal discernment, drawing on his own years of studio experience. Much has been written about rock and pop in the last 35 years, but hardly any of it deals with what is actually heard in a given pop song. The Producer as Composer tries to unravel the mystery of good pop: why does it sound the way it does?
The extensive journals of the English gentleman composer John Marsh, which cover the period from 1752-1828, represent one the most important musical and social documents of the period to have hitherto remained unpublished. Drawing on the recently discovered original (now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California), the selection covers the first fifty years of Marsh's life, a period of intense musical activity in the southern cathedral cities of Salisbury, Canterbury and Chichester. But Marsh was far more than a provincial composer and music director; the journals also cast much valuable light on musical life in London -- his account of the great Handel Commemoration of 1784 is without parallel for its colorful evocation of the huge event. A lively interest in a wide range of topics gives the journals a scope rare in the writings of a musician, and the volume will be indispensable not only to the musical but also the social historian. The unfailingly vital and often witty writing also ensures considerable appeal to the more general reader with an interest in an eventful period of English history. The volume has been comprehensively annotated and includes illustrations and contemporary maps in addition to the first complete published listing of Marsh's compositions and writings.
The case-study records of six sixth-grade composers were examined for evidence of connections between the music and life experiences of the students and compositions they wrote. Analysis revealed rich and varied connections between the students' contexts and their music. Idiomatic writing related to instrumental and ensemble experiences was present in their works, and links between instrumental fluency and fluency in composing became evident. Familiar melodies from instrumental experiences, films, and television served as starting points for compositions. Social and cultural cues related to other media as well as to school and home life were also evident in compositions. Findings suggest that young composers draw on their sociocultural milieu and personal experiences to create music that is relevant and meaningful to them.
Early American women composers are barely represented in standard reference works, yet their output constitutes a significant proportion of the bound sheet music in the collections in New York Public Library, Yale University, Boston Public Library, and the New York Historical Society that form the basis of this study. Beginning with the first sheet music published by a woman in America, in the 1790s, the book goes on to examine music by mid-nineteenth century composers, including brief biographies of five prominent women active in the 1850s and 60s. Judith Tick is Professor of Music at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.
This comprehensive and systematic study of compositional process in Renaissance music draws on documentary, manuscript and theoretical evidence to construct an explanation of how composers actually worked. Through a study of autograph sketches, drafts and fair copies of composers such as Henricus Isaac, Cipriano de Rore, Francesco Corteccia and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, it reveals a process of working in separate parts, line by line, and not in full score, as in modern editions. This dicovery has major implications for the analysis, editorial interpretation, and performance of early music.
This book is a study of a group of composers who are living and working in South Africa today. Seven chapters provide brief biographies, a general appraisal of style and analyses of some major works of the following people: Arnold van Wyk, Hubert du Plessis, Stefans Grove, Graham Newcater, Peter Klatzow, Roelof Temmingh and Carl van Wyk. An eighth and final chapter presents a survey of a younger generation of composers, all under 40, who have already made their mark at home or abroad. Readership: students, the interested reader, compilers of programme notes, musicologists.
The evolution of the record producer from organizer to auteur, from Phil Spector and George Martin to the rise of hip-hop and remixing.In the 1960s, rock and pop music recording questioned the convention that recordings should recreate the illusion of a concert hall setting. The Wall of Sound that Phil Spector built behind various artists and the intricate eclecticism of George Martin's recordings of the Beatles did not resemble live performances—in the Albert Hall or elsewhere—but instead created a new sonic world. The role of the record producer, writes Virgil Moorefield in The Producer as Composer, was evolving from that of organizer to auteur; band members became actors in what Frank Zappa called a "movie for your ears." In rock and pop, in the absence of a notated score, the recorded version of a song—created by the producer in collaboration with the musicians—became the definitive version. Moorefield, a musician and producer himself, traces this evolution with detailed discussions of works by producers and producer-musicians including Spector and Martin, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Trent Reznor, Quincy Jones, and the Chemical Brothers. Underlying the transformation, Moorefield writes, is technological development: new techniques—tape editing, overdubbing, compression—and, in the last ten years, inexpensive digital recording equipment that allows artists to become their own producers. What began when rock and pop producers reinvented themselves in the 1960s has continued; Moorefield describes the importance of disco, hip-hop, remixing, and other forms of electronic music production in shaping the sound of contemporary pop. He discusses the making of Pet Sounds and the production of tracks by Public Enemy with equal discernment, drawing on his own years of studio experience. Much has been written about rock and pop in the last 35 years, but hardly any of it deals with what is actually heard in a given pop song. The Producer as Composer tries to unravel the mystery of good pop: why does it sound the way it does?