Scholarly Works - Music
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Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Haptic Beethoven(Oxford University Press, 2017-11-01) Marston, NJ; Marston, Nicholas [0000-0001-5046-5920]On 10 December 1849 the Viennese War Department official and dedicated collector of manuscripts Aloys Fuchs (1799–1853) wrote in high dudgeon to his Berlin contemporary and fellow collector Friedrich August Grasnick (1798–1877). Grasnick had borrowed from him two of his most important manuscripts, of works by Handel and Bach, and had failed to return them punctually, so that Fuchs now did not have them available to show to others. He blamed himself as much as Grasnick (clearly this was not the first occasion of its kind), and vowed never to let such treasures out of his possession again: ‘It is quite simply inexcusable for me to allow such a valuable and utterly irreplaceable jewel as my Handel item [Stük] ever to leave the house.’Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Science on the Niger: Ventilation and Tropical Disease during the 1841 Niger Expedition(Oxford University Press, 2018-08-01) Gillin, Edward; Gillin, Edward [0000-0001-9449-9292]In 1841 the British government supported an expedition to the River Niger. This venture aimed to spread Christianity and encourage the abolition of slavery in the region, but the high mortality rates due to tropical disease presented a threat to the undertaking. To resolve this problem, the three expedition steamships were built as giant ventilating systems, under the direction of chemist David Boswell Reid. Grounded on miasmic notions of disease, it was hoped that these vessels would purify the air for the expedition’s crew and protect them from the ravages of malaria and yellow fever. This article examines how contemporaries evaluated the performance of this ventilation scheme. It argues that the credibility of Reid’s apparatus was highly political and engendered differing imperial agendas. In Victorian Britain, the potential for ventilation technology to assist colonial expansion was debated through differing accounts of the Niger Expedition as either a success or failure.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed An inclusive history for a divided world?(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2018) Frolova-Walker, M; Frolova-Walker, Marina [0000-0001-6846-1645]ABSTRACTThe article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but also today, in the midst of a new cold war.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Lyon's Wagnerian Diva: Louise Janssen (1863–1938)(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2018-11) Ellis, Katharine; Ellis, Katharine [0000-0001-5431-584X]AbstractIt seems historiographically implausible to ascribe the reputation of fin-de-siècle Lyon as France's Bayreuth to the impact of a single middle-ranking soprano, but the Danish singer Louise Janssen's long-term presence, galvanic musical influence and box-office value suggest precisely that conclusion. Part of the explanation lies with the diva-worship of her supporters (‘Janssenistes’), who curated her image both during her career and in her retirement to create an adopted musical heroine whose memory remains guarded by Lyon council policy. That image, selectively constructed from among her Wagner roles, also typecast her as a singer who had much in common with Symbolist art – a potential Mélisande that Lyon never saw. This article brings together archival and press materials to explain how a foreign-born singer's agency and mythification contributed to a double French naturalisation – her own, and that of Wagner(ism).Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain(University of California Press, 2017-07) Cole, Ross; Cole, Ross [0000-0001-6281-3099]Focusing on a series of pioneering radio ballads produced for the BBC between 1958 and 1961 by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, and Peggy Seeger, this article explores representations of industrial working-class culture in folksongs of the radical Left. Situating such work in relation to A. L. Lloyd, mass culture, the nascent New Left, gender, and the aesthetics of social realism (distinct from the project of Soviet socialist realism), I argue that early radio ballads were nostalgic panegyrics for the integrity of working-class identity in the face of unprecedented socio-economic change. At the very moment when distinctively masculine working-class traditions seemed to be at risk of disappearing under the rising tide of affluence, Conservative Party rhetoric, female emancipation, and the emergence of a classless commodity utopia, these programs generated a portrait of an unwavering British subculture damaged and defined by capitalist exploitation yet resistant to the unwelcome advance of globalized modernity. Ultimately, such work revealed far more about MacColl’s own political convictions than about the intricacies of working-class life in Britain.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England(University of Illinois Press, 2019-02-01) Cole, RG; Cole, Ross [0000-0001-6281-3099]This article explores how and why a particular vision of folksong became widely popular during the early twentieth century. Focusing on Cecil J. Sharp, I show that despite severe criticism from contemporaries his beliefs won out as the dominant paradigm for the understanding of folk music. Interrogating the politics of his theorizing, moreover, I draw out the hitherto neglected imbrications between folk revivalism and fascist ideology. Seen as dialectical tools capable of reforming citizens through the expressive contours of their racial birthright, I argue, collected songs and dances were repurposed in the service of forging a national socialist consciousness.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle(University of California Press, 2018-12-04) Cole, Ross; Cole, Ross [0000-0001-6281-3099]This article foregrounds discrepancies between vernacular singing in England and the work of London’s Folk-Song Society during the 1890s. Figures such as Lucy Broadwood, Kate Lee, and Hubert Parry acted as gatekeepers through whom folk culture had to pass in order to be understood as such. Informed by colonialist epistemology, socialist radicalism, and literary Romanticism, what may be termed the “folkloric imagination” concealed the very thing it claimed to identify. Folk song, thus produced, represents the popular voice under erasure. Situated as the antidote to degeneration, burgeoning mass consumer culture, and escalating urbanization, the folk proved to be the perfect tabula rasa upon which the historiographical, political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin de siècle could be inscribed. Positioned as a restorative bulwark against the shifting tides of modernity, the talismanic folk and their songs were temporal anachronisms conjured up via the discursive strategies that attempted to describe them. Increased attention should hence be paid to singers such as Henry Burstow and the Copper brothers of Rottingdean in order to rescue their histories from the conceptual apparatus of folk song.Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed An Uncrossable Rubicon: Liszt’s Sardanapalo Revisited(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Trippett, DJ; Trippett, David [0000-0002-1252-0324]In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt’s composition and abandonment of Sardanapalo. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt’s mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel’s future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt’s mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt’s impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Notes on troubling ‘the popular’(Cambridge University Press, 2018-10-01) Cole, RG; Cole, Ross [0000-0001-6281-3099]This article throws new light on the troublesome question ‘what is popular music?’ by pursuing a genealogy of discourse in Britain during a crucial period from 1860 to 1920 in which modernity is increasingly characterised by an antagonistic relationship between intellectual elites and consumer entertainment. Focusing on London music halls, social reformism and ragtime, I argue that the term fell into two broad categories of use: first, to identify and/or denigrate mass culture; and second, to establish a pathway for edification and to champion ideals of respectability. Although implicated in the construction of binary oppositions and frequently associated with impropriety, the popular was not always associated with lowness. The idea, however, was shot through with contradictions deriving from a view of ‘the people’ as being simultaneously docile and seditious. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the popular is a floating signifier with the potential to reference mutually opposing ideas.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Liturgical re-enactments and the Reformation(Oxford University Press, 2017-11) Trocmé-Latter, DHalf a century after Luther compiled his 95 Theses it is worth reminding ourselves of the significance of music in the widespread liturgical reforms of the 16th century. Naturally, there was little initial consensus on what was acceptable in church: in some places, choirs and organs fell silent; in others, polyphony thrived. In certain reformed liturgies, not even the congregation sang (although they participated in other ways). Yet the series of events that collectively became known as the Protestant Reformation had a profound effect on music—choral and instrumental—both during the 16th century and in the decades and centuries to follow. The year 2017, therefore, seems an appropriate time to reflect on how we, as musicologists and performers, have experienced and continue to experience the Reformation.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Towards a Materialist History of Music: Histories of Sensation(Duke University) Trippett, DJ; Trippett, David [0000-0002-1252-0324]This essay examines the history of auditory sensation, and the methodological challenges posed by the recovery of sensory communication. With a focus on physical encounters and the limits of the body, the somatic force of sound is central to the essay’s review of the artist’s physical and sensory capacity as it relates both to the art he or she produces and to his or her way of perceiving it. The essay divides into two sections: first, an examination of issues around historically lost sensations of sound; and second, the recovery of lost soundscapes. The author suggests that sense perception is not an unchanging facet of medical history, but is subject to cultural influences and local norms. The essay seeks to uncover in its various delimited contexts a historically flexible shaping of perception.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation(G. Schirmer) Trippett, David JohnAmid recent moves toward sound as vibrational force, this article argues that hearing has a special role in determining our natural sensory limits, and that recent attempts to push against these limits foreground the underlying matter of what status the biological body has in music perception and performance during the technological age. Between 1876 and 1894, prominent German acousticians—including Helmholtz—argued that humans could hear vibrations as high as 40,960Hz. While this was ultimately discredited, recent post-tonal works have notated pitches that explicitly play with, or exceed, the ordinary range of human hearing; (cf. Schoenberg, Per Nørgård, and Salvatore Sciarrino). In the context of existing ecological approaches to listening, this article asks what kind of listener such works imply. Specifically, it investigates the musical relevance of Umwelt theory by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, in which individuals “create” the bubble of their perceivable environment according to a reciprocal interchange between limited sense capacity and mental habit. I contrast Uexküll’s acceptance of human limits with a transhumanist worldview which anticipates the enhancement of biological sense capacities through technology. Such “morphological freedom - the right to modify and enhance one’s body” (Bostrum 2009) putatively includes augmentation of the auditory system. Finally, by tracing the genealogy of human prosthesis back to the founder of a philosopher of technology (Kapp 1877), I critique the potential for technologies in clinical audiology to grant access to ultrasonic frequencies, and assess the implications of augmented, prosthetic hearing for non-impaired listeners. The discourse of transhumanism poses questions for musical listening as soon as the body becomes an assemblage subject to variation. It raises the question of how identity—ours as well as that of musical works—might be affected by “morphological freedom,” the extent to which self-identity becomes the lost referential when agency is distributed between biological and non-biological parts, and it asks what value are the new intellectual vistas that emerge when musical experience is conceived in material terms as communication between bodies.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Music and the transhuman ear: Ultrasonics, material bodies, and the limits of sensation(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2017) Trippett, D; Trippett, David [0000-0002-1252-0324]Amid recent moves toward sound as vibrational force, this article argues that hearing has a special role in determining our natural sensory limits, and that recent attempts to push against these limits foreground the underlying matter of what status the biological body has in music perception and performance during the technological age. Between 1876 and 1894, prominent German acousticians—including Helmholtz—argued that humans could hear vibrations as high as 40,960Hz. While this was ultimately discredited, recent post-tonal works have notated pitches that explicitly play with, or exceed, the ordinary range of human hearing; (cf. Schoenberg, Per Nørgård, and Salvatore Sciarrino). In the context of existing ecological approaches to listening, this article asks what kind of listener such works imply. Specifically, it investigates the musical relevance of Umwelt theory by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, in which individuals “create” the bubble of their perceivable environment according to a reciprocal interchange between limited sense capacity and mental habit. I contrast Uexküll’s acceptance of human limits with a transhumanist worldview which anticipates the enhancement of biological sense capacities through technology. Such “morphological freedom - the right to modify and enhance one’s body” (Bostrum 2009) putatively includes augmentation of the auditory system. Finally, by tracing the genealogy of human prosthesis back to the founder of a philosopher of technology (Kapp 1877), I critique the potential for technologies in clinical audiology to grant access to ultrasonic frequencies, and assess the implications of augmented, prosthetic hearing for non-impaired listeners. The discourse of transhumanism poses questions for musical listening as soon as the body becomes an assemblage subject to variation. It raises the question of how identity—ours as well as that of musical works—might be affected by “morphological freedom,” the extent to which self-identity becomes the lost referential when agency is distributed between biological and non-biological parts, and it asks what value are the new intellectual vistas that emerge when musical experience is conceived in material terms as communication between bodies.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Beyond Verismo: Massenet’s La Navarraise and ‘Realism’ in Fin-de-siècle Paris(Taylor & Francis, 2019) Bentley, CA; Bentley, Charlotte [0000-0002-9564-0320]The ‘réalisme’ of Massenet’s La Navarraise divided critics at its belated Parisian première on 3 October 1895. While the opera has typically been read as a straightforward attempt at French verismo, this article suggests a more complex set of ways in which modernity and the modern world shaped critical perceptions of and responses to realism. Placing La Navarraise within its wider cultural and technological contexts, I argue that the critics’ ambivalence to its realism provides insight into the changing and contested nature of critical perception and subjectivity in Paris in the final years of the nineteenth century.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Race for Robert and Other Rivalries: Negotiating the Local and (Inter)National in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans(Cambridge University Press, 2017-03) Bentley, CA; Bentley, Charlotte [0000-0002-9564-0320]Grand opéra occupied a prominent but fraught position in the life of New Orleans in the 1830s, where it became a focus for debates surrounding contemporary cultural and political issues. In 1835, the city’s rival theatres – one francophone, the other anglophone – raced to give the first performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, bringing tensions between their respective communities to a head. This article explores Robert’s arrival in New Orleans, arguing that the discourses that grew up first around this work and later Les Huguenots provided a means through which opposing linguistic and cultural factions within the city could negotiate their local, national and international identities.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Music intervals in speech: Psychological disposition modulates ratio precision among interlocutors’ nonlocal f0 production in real-time dyadic conversation(SAGE Publications, 2016-11-01) Robledo, JP; Hurtado, E; Prado, F; Román, D; Cornejo, CDrawing on the notion of musical intervals, recent studies have demonstrated the use of precise frequency ratios within human vocalisation. Methodologically, these studies have addressed human vocalisation at an individual level. In the present study, we asked whether patterns such as musical intervals can also be found among the voices of people engaging in a conversation as an emerging interpersonal phenomenon. Fifty-six participants were randomly paired and assigned to either a control or a low-trust condition. Frequency ratios were generated by juxtaposing nonlocal fundamental frequency (f0) productions from two people engaged in each given dyadic conversation. Differences were found among conditions, both in terms of interval distribution and precision. These results support the idea that psychological dispositions modulate the musical intervals generated between participants through mutual real-time vocal accommodation. They also underscore the inter-domain use of musical intervals.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed ‘Departed ghosts in living forms appear’: Abiathar, Doeg, and Jennens’s conception of Saul(Oxford University Press, 2017-06-26) Varka, NEAlthough it is not uncommon to find discrepancies between the wordbook and the primary musical sources of a Handel oratorio, even the first page of the wordbook of Saul might puzzle anyone familiar with Handel’s music: the Dramatis Personae names two characters that will not necessarily appear in a modern performance or recording of the work. The first—Abiathar—was described by Winton Dean as ‘a ghost with no music’, and his presence in three places in the wordbook must have been an oversight by Charles Jennens, who decided to refer to Abiathar by his title alone—High Priest—and to reallocate some of his lines to Abner, before Handel even received a copy of the libretto. The second—Doeg—was added by Jennens to the libretto and the autograph score after Handel had begun composing. A discussion of these characters offers new insights into how Jennens approached the adaptation of Scripture for oratorio. By omitting Abiathar’s name he was navigating carefully through a contemporary religious controversy, and by adding Doeg’s name he was relying upon his audience’s knowledge of what is now an obscure part of the Bible in order to strengthen his characterization of Saul and Michal.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Samuel Howard and the Music for the Installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor of Cambridge University, 1769(Cambridge University Press, 2017-08) Howard, AD; Howard, Alan [0000-0002-0430-6555]Samuel Howard (?1710–1782) has long been a familiar inhabitant of the diligent footnotes of Handel biographers. A choirboy in the Chapel Royal, he was a member of Handel’s chorus and the composer of much theatre music of his own; he later became organist of both St Bride’s, Fleet Street and nearby St Clement Danes, Strand, where he was buried in 1782. His most significant and ambitious work is his fine orchestrally accompanied anthem ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made’, published posthumously in 1792 with an impressive title page detailing the performance of the work ‘at St Margaret’s Church before the governors of the Westminster Infirmary, in the Two Universities, and upon many other Publick Occasions in different parts of the Kingdom’. This article confirms for the first time that this work originated as Howard’s doctoral exercise, drawing on contemporary press reports and information in the University archives; together these make clear that the composer’s doctorate was linked to the provision of music for the Duke of Grafton’s installation as Chancellor in 1769. Surviving information about this event offers a glimpse of musical life in Cambridge on a comparable scale to the much better reported proceedings upon similar occasions in Oxford. This evidence then serves as a starting point from which to consider Howard’s later prominence as a director of high-profile public performances in London and the provinces.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Hockets Broken and Integrated in Early Mensural Theory and an Early Motet(Cambridge University Press, 2017-10-01) Curran, SP; Curran, Sean Paul [0000-0001-7835-2303]Notwithstanding recent discoveries of big, textless hockets from the late thirteenth century, there remains a pervasive uncertainty as to how hockets should be defined and identified on the small scale at which they characteristically manifest in thirteenth-century motets. Revisiting the mensural theorists up to Franco of Cologne this article finds that only with Franco must hockets be multi-voice phenomena: earlier texts define the hocket at the level of a single perfection, and as it manifests in the breaking of a single performing voice. Under a revised definition, 138 motet texts that use hockets are identified in the $\textit{Ars Antiqua}$ repertory. A second look at the St Emmeram Anonymous (who builds on Lambertus more than he lets on) finds that he acknowledges but departs from the consensus that the hocket is sonically fragmented, also hearing it as a promise of the co-ordination achievable when musical time is measured. For him, the hocket had a dual character, its sonic fragmentation contrived through integrated planning. But hearing hockets integratively is difficult, and requires an effort of will that (for St Emmeram) has moral stakes. The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet $\textit{Dame de valour}$ (71) / $\textit{Dame vostre douz regart}$ (72) / MANERE (M5), finding that (like St Emmeram), the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source). Through the cloud of citational references that cut across the parts, forged by materials drawn from the motet’s refrains, we are invited to hear with understanding the formal patterns the same materials build in each individual voice, and a reciprocity at which those patterns arrive. The hocket depicts a vocal failure caused by heartbreak just as the triplum stages the composition of a new song out of the experience of love: the hocket marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, and of a formal sort. Several decades before St Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically, the motet’s composer knew it as a creative resource, and turned to it as a means of posing artfully some questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. The motetus’s narrator seems to understand what is going on: falling silent in his hocket, he receives a message that has transformative effects on him, whose implications I conclude by pondering. Across eight centuries, these voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognizing the debate’s longevity does not force us to agree with old positions.Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed Introduction Subjectivity in European Song: Time, Place, and Identity(University of California Press, 2017-04) Taylor, B; Owen, C