Download or read book The Politics of Plainchant in fin de si cle France written by Katharine Ellis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells three inter-related stories that radically alter our perspective on plainchant reform at the turn of the twentieth century and highlight the value of liturgical music history to our understanding of French government anticlericalism. It offers at once a new history of the rise of the Benedictines of Solesmes to official dominance over Catholic editions of plainchant worldwide, a new optic on the French liturgical publishing industry during a period of international crisis for the publication of plainchant notation, and an exploration of how, both despite and because of official hostility, French Catholics could bend Republican anticlericalism at the highest level to their own ends. The narrative relates how Auguste Pécoul, a former French diplomat and Benedictine novice, masterminded an undercover campaign to aid the Gregorian agenda of the Solesmes monks via French government intervention at the Vatican. His vehicle: trades unionists from within the book industry, whom he mobilized into nationalist protest against Vatican attempts to enshrine a single, contested, and German, version of the musical text as canon law. Yet the political scheming necessitated by Pécoul’s double involvement with Solesmes and the print unions almost spun out of control as his Benedictine contacts struggled with internal division and anticlerical persecution. The results are as musicologically significant for the study of Solesmes as they are instructive for the study of Church-State relations.
Download or read book Sacred Sounds Secular Spaces written by Jennifer Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military defeat, political and civil turmoil, and a growing unrest between Catholic traditionalists and increasingly secular Republicans formed the basis of a deep-seated identity crisis in Third Republic France. Beginning in the early 1880s, Republican politicians introduced increasingly secularizing legislation to the parliamentary floor that included, but was not limited to, the secularization of the French educational system. As the divide between Church and State widened on the political stage, more and more composers began writing religious--even liturgical--music for performance in decidedly secular venues, including popular cabaret theaters, prestigious opera houses, and international exhibitions. This trend coincided with Pope Leo XIII's Ralliement politics that encouraged conservative Catholics to "rally" with the Republican government. But the idea of a musical Ralliement has largely gone unquestioned by historians and musicologists alike. Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces provides the first fundamental reconsideration of music's role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church in the Third Republic. In doing so, the book dismantles the somewhat simplistic epistemological position that emphasizes a sharp division between the Church and the "secular" Republic during this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, critical reception studies, and musical analysis, author Jennifer Walker reveals how composers and critics from often opposing ideological factions undermined the secular/sacred binary through composition and musical performance in an effort to craft a brand of Frenchness that was built on the dual foundations of secular Republicanism and the heritage of the French Catholic Church.
Download or read book Resonant Recoveries written by Jillian C. Rogers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--
Download or read book Stories of Tonality in the Age of Fran ois Joseph F tis written by Thomas Christensen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-05-27 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to French Music written by Simon Trezise and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France has a long and rich music history that has had a far-reaching impact upon music and cultures around the world. This accessible Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the music of France. With chapters on a range of music genres, internationally renowned authors survey music-making from the early middle ages to the present day. The first part provides a complete chronological history structured around key historical events. The second part considers opera and ballet and their institutions and works, and the third part explores traditional and popular music. In the final part, contributors analyse five themes and topics, including the early church and its institutions, manuscript sources, the musical aesthetics of the Siècle des Lumières, and music at the court during the ancien régime. Illustrated with photographs and music examples, this book will be essential reading for both students and music lovers.
Download or read book Music in Films on the Middle Ages written by John Haines and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.
Download or read book Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception written by Jennifer Bain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Bain contextualizes the revival of Hildegard's music, engaging with intersections amongst local devotion and political, religious, and intellectual activity.
Download or read book The Politics of Verdi s Cantica written by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Verdi's Cantica treats a singular case study of the use of music to resist oppression, combat evil, and fight injustice. Cantica, better known as Inno delle nazioni / Hymn of the Nations, commissioned from Italy's foremost composer to represent the newly independent nation at the 1862 London International Exhibition, served as a national voice of pride and of protest for Italy across two centuries and in two very different political situations. The book unpacks, for the first time, the full history of Verdi's composition from its creation, performance, and publication in the 1860s through its appropriation as purposeful social and political commentary and its perception by American broadcast media as a 'weapon of art' in the mid twentieth century. Based on largely untapped primary archival and other documentary sources, journalistic writings, and radio and film scripts, the project discusses the changing meanings of the composition over time. It not only unravels the complex history of the work in the nineteenth century, of greater significance it offers the first fully documented study of the performances, radio broadcast, and filming of the work by the renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini during World War II. In presenting new evidence about ways in which Verdi's music was appropriated by expatriate Italians and the US government for cross-cultural propaganda in America and Italy, it addresses the intertwining of Italian and American culture with regard to art, politics, and history; and investigates the ways in which the press and broadcast media helped construct a musical weapon that traversed ethnic, aesthetic, and temporal boundaries to make a strong political statement.
Download or read book Vatican I written by John W. O'Malley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1869, some seven hundred Catholic bishops traveled to Rome to participate in the first church-wide council in three hundred years. The French Revolution had shaken the foundations of the church. Pope Pius IX was determined to set things right through a declaration by the council that the pope was infallible. John W. O’Malley brings to life the bitter, schism-threatening conflicts that erupted at Vatican I. The pope’s zeal in pressing for infallibility raised questions about the legitimacy of the council, at the same time as Italian forces under Garibaldi seized the Papal States and were threatening to take control of Rome itself. Gladstone and Bismarck entered the fray. As its temporal dominion shrank, the Catholic Church became more pope-centered than ever before, with lasting consequences. “O’Malley’s account of the debate over infallibility is masterful.” —Commonweal “[O’Malley] excels in describing the ways in which the council initiated deep changes that still affect the everyday lives of Catholics.” —First Things “An eminent scholar of modern Catholicism...O’Malley...invit[es] us to see Catholicism’s recent history as profoundly shaped by and against the imposing legacy of Pius IX.” —Wall Street Journal “Gripping...O’Malley continues to engage us with a past that remains vitally present.” —The Tablet “The worldwide dean of church historians has completed his trinity of works on church councils...[A] masterclass in church history...telling us as much about the church now as then.” —America
Download or read book Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe written by Susan Rankin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical notation has not always existed: in the West, musical traditions have often depended on transmission from mouth to ear, and ear to mouth. Although the Ancient Greeks had a form of musical notation, it was not passed on to the medieval Latin West. This comprehensive study investigates the breadth of use of musical notation in Carolingian Europe, including many examples previously unknown in studies of notation, to deliver a crucial foundational model for the understanding of later Western notations. An overview of the study of neumatic notations from the French monastic scholar Dom Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) up to the present day precedes an examination of the function and potential of writing in support of a musical practice which continued to depend on trained memory. Later chapters examine passages of notation to reveal those ways in which scripts were shaped by contemporary rationalizations of musical sound. Finally, the new scripts are situated in the cultural and social contexts in which they emerged.
Download or read book Debussy s Critics written by Alexandra Kieffer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.
Download or read book Music and the Making of Portugal and Spain written by Matthew Machin-Autenrieth and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How music embodies and contributes to historical and contemporary nationalism What does music in Portugal and Spain reveal about the relationship between national and regional identity building? How do various actors use music to advance nationalism? How have state and international heritage regimes contributed to nationalist and regionalist projects? In this collection, contributors explore these and other essential questions from a range of interdisciplinary vantage points. The essays pay particular attention to the role played by the state in deciding what music represents Portuguese or Spanish identity. Case studies examine many aspects of the issue, including local recording networks, so-called national style in popular music, and music’s role in both political protest and heritage regimes. Topics include the ways the Salazar and Franco regimes adapted music to align with their ideological agendas; the twenty-first-century impact of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program on some of Portugal and Spain's expressive practices; and the tensions that arise between institutions and community in creating and recreating meanings and identity around music. Contributors: Ricardo Andrade, Vera Marques Alves, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, José Hugo Pires Castro, Paulo Ferreira de Castro, Fernán del Val, Héctor Fouce, Diego García-Peinazo, Leonor Losa, Josep Martí, Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Pedro Russo Moreira, Cristina Cruces Roldán, and Igor Contreras Zubillaga
Download or read book Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture 1860 1960 written by Deborah Mawer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume of case studies presents a selective history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, the book explores the nature of relationships between one main period, broadly the 'long' modernist era between 1860–1960, and its own historical ‘others’, referencing topics from the Romantic, classical, baroque, renaissance and medieval periods. It probes the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for reinterpretation across time and place. Notions of cultural meaning are paramount, especially those pertaining to French identity, national and individual. While founded on historical musicology, the approach benefits from interdisciplinary association with philosophy, political history, literature, fine art, film studies and criticism. Attention is paid to French composers’ celebrations and remakings of their predecessors. Editions of and writings about earlier music are examined, together with the cultural reception of performances of past repertoire. Organized into two parts, each of the eleven chapters characterizes a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading. The interwar years and those surrounding the Second World War prove particularly rich sources of enquiry. This volume aims to attract a wide readership of musicologists and musicians, as well as cultural historians, other humanities scholars and concert-goers.
Download or read book Understanding Medieval Liturgy written by Helen Gittos and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.
Download or read book Magister Jacobus de Ispania Author of the Speculum musicae written by Margaret Bent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Speculum musicae of the early fourteenth century, with nearly half a million words, is by a long way the largest medieval treatise on music, and probably the most learned. Only the final two books are about music as commonly understood: the other five invite further work by students of scholastic philosophy, theology and mathematics. For nearly a century, its author has been known as Jacques de Liège or Jacobus Leodiensis. ’Jacobus’ is certain, fixed by an acrostic declared within the text; Liège is hypothetical, based on evidence shown here to be less than secure. The one complete manuscript, Paris BnF lat. 7207, thought by its editor to be Florentine, can now be shown on the basis of its miniatures by Cristoforo Cortese to be from the Veneto, datable c. 1434-40. New documentary evidence in an Italian inventory, also from the Veneto, describes a lost copy of the treatise dating from before 1419, older than the surviving manuscript, and identifies its author as ’Magister Jacobus de Ispania’. If this had been known eighty years ago, the Liège hypothesis would never have taken root. It invites a new look at the geography and influences that played into this central document of medieval music theory. The two new attributes of ’Magister’ and ’de Ispania’ (i.e. a foreigner) prompted an extensive search in published indexes for possible identities. Surprisingly few candidates of this name emerged, and only one in the right date range. It is here suggested that the author of the Speculum is either someone who left no paper trail or James of Spain, a nephew of Eleanor of Castile, wife of King Edward I, whose career is documented mostly in England. He was an illegitimate son of Eleanor’s older half-brother, the Infante Enrique of Castile. Documentary evidence shows that he was a wealthy and well-travelled royal prince who was also an Oxford magister. The book traces his career and the likelihood of his authorship of the Speculum musicae.
Download or read book Johann Mattheson s Pi ces de clavecin and Das neu er ffnete Orchestre written by Margaret Seares and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific music theorist and critic as well as an established composer, Johannes Mattheson remains surprisingly understudied. In this important study, Margaret Seares places Mattheson‘s Pi‘s de clavecin (1714) in the context of his work as a public intellectual who encouraged German musicians and their musical public to eschew what he saw as the hidebound traditions of the past, and instead embrace a universalism of style and expression derived from contemporary currents in music of the leading European nations. Beginning with the early non-musical writings by Mattheson, Seares places them in the context of the cosmopolitan city-state of Hamburg, before moving to a detailed study of his first major musical treatise Das neu-er ffnete Orchestre of 1713, in which he espoused his views about the musics of the past and present and, in particular, the characteristics of the musics of Germany, Italy, France and England. This latter section of the treatise, Part III, is edited and translated into English in the book's appendix - the first such translation available. Seares then moves on to an evaluation of the Pi‘s de clavecin as a work in which Mattheson reflects in musical terms the themes of modernism (in the sense ofa mode) and universalism that are such a strong part of his writings of the period, and a work that represents an important precursor for the keyboard suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel.
Download or read book Operatic Geographies written by Suzanne Aspden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.
