A musical challenge to our view of the past
In Musical Exoticism (Cambridge 2011) Ralph P. Locke undertook an extensive appraisal of the portrayal of the ‘Other’ in works dating from 1700 to the present day, an enquiry that embraced a wide range of genres from Baroque opera to Algerian rap, and which was at once musical, cultural, historical, political and ethical.
Is it okay to tweet during a concert, if it allows those who couldn’t attend to engage with the performance and the music? Or is it really just distracting, on top of all the coughing?
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera.
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’.
Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
An important new book on Italo Montemezzi sheds light on his opera Nave. The author/editor is David Chandler whose books on Alfredo Catalani have done so much to restore interest in the genre.
Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions.
I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now difficult to locate.
Vincent Giroud’s valuable new French Opera, a Short History, is in hand and very welcome it is.
The noted operatic impresario and stage director, Lotfi Mansouri, with the professional help of writer Donald Arthur, has issued his memoirs under the title Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey.
Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors.
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding.
Readers may recognize the author of this book, David J. Buch, a specialist on the origins of the libretto to Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good.
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now difficult to locate.
The format of the series as a whole is continued here: the Editor, Charles Dill of the University of Wisconsin, USA, provides an intriguing and detailed introduction to the period itself and also poses some pertinent questions on the state of current operatic scholarship. Both purely academic as well as musicological work is included and the reader will find a variety of approaches represented in the collection: sources, criticism, performers, authors, composers, culture, theory etc. The historical context is heavily represented as are the socio-political parameters of the time.
The collection is divided into four separate parts, three general, and one specific: Librettos, Gender, Theatres & Performing and, lastly, Handel. Presumably the latter section was given a separate heading due to the over-arching importance of this composer in this specific period of 1700-1750. With the regeneration of baroque opera performance in the late 20th and early 21st century, there has been a parallel regeneration of academic study of this specific period, so this substantial volume of works should meet a need. However, it is important to note that there are only five essays out of the total of 23 that were written since the year 2000, the vast majority being from the years 1995-98. One presumes that more modern work is widely available to today’s scholars as the essays here need to be placed in their own context of performance practice in the mid-90’s when much was in flux still after the seismic rethinks of the 70’s and 80’s.
The original sources for the essays are not wide, many from the Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, and Early Music and some will be already familiar to students of baroque opera – for example Katherine Bergeron (1996) “The Castrato as History” (COJ). From a practical viewpoint, there are many pages reproduced in very small print which is not easy to read; however, this is somewhat counterbalanced by useful musical illustrations of specific passages and apposite photographs of artworks and manuscripts. All the original footnotes and references for each essay are included and there is a useful, if limited, Name Index at the end of the volume.
Sue Loder