Musicological Explorations, Vol. 13 (2012)
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This issue was first published online, July 17th, 2013.
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Item An interview with Allan Gordon Bell(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Zaborowski, MonikaAlberta-born composer Allan Gordon Bell is a well-known representative of what is a true “Canadian” music. Bell's music is not contemporary in the sense that he is trying to confuse the audience and apply theories that can only be understood by the few academics that wish to analyze it. Instead, his music derives its sounds from aural experiences from the Albertan landscape. Bell is fascinated with the outer world of his land. Mapping the musical sounds of his environment through ‘pure’ listening, Bell has developed a compositional language that challenges listeners to find experiential connections in his music, calling out for us to find our place in this land we call Canada. His music evokes aural memories of our Canadian surroundings, to inform us and remind us of the beauty we so often neglect. Bell is a Professor of Music at the University of Calgary, and former President of the Canadian Music Centre. I spoke with the composer via telephone on October 20, 2011.Item Schenker and the Moonlight Sonata: Unpublished graphs and commentary(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Kimura, KiyomiThis paper examines Schenker’s unpublished materials on the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata — analytic graphs of the work and a commentary on its performance. The materials, which are found in the Felix Salzer Papers at the New York Public Library, include analyses prepared in a seminar conducted by Schenker from 1931 until the spring of 1934. There are three full-length graphs of the first movement shown in five levels. Of the three, one is a complete graph in the hand of Greta Kraus (a member of seminar); two, in the hand of Angelika Elias, are nearly complete. (Elias was not a member of the seminar; she studied Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in her private lessons with Schenker.) In addition to the pages of the analyses, there is a commentary on performance interpretation titled Notizen zum Vortrag der Mondscheinsonate (Notes on the performance of the Moonlight Sonata). I will provide a facsimile, transcription, and English translation of the commentary on the first movement. I will also present Kraus’s complete graph of the first movement in facsimile and will compare selected passages with the interpretations given in the graphs by Elias. As a supplement, I will offer a few analytic interpretations of my own. In my paper, I will relate the unpublished graphs, the Notizen, and Schenker’s fingerings in the hope that together they will serve both pianists and theorists as an important guide to Schenker’s analysis and provide them with insights into the performance of the Moonlight Sonata.Item Item From the editor(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Gillis, IainItem The setting-up and the role of a couple "corpus/counter-corpus": The example of the nineteenth-century student concertos(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Lachat-Sarrete, PriscilleIn order to establish the implicit expectations of the public for concertos in the nineteenth century, a “counter-corpus”, which, following Jean-Jacques Nattiez, may be compared to the main corpus, is obtained by applying to the standard repertoire a sorting filter comprising essential and secondary conditions. This counter-corpus consists of concertos and concertinos written for students, which offered intermediate-level instrumentalists the opportunity to discover the principles of the concerto genre. Although some of the theatrical effects specific to the genre were neglected in the works of this countercorpus, these works nevertheless provide some reliable information about the public’s expectations for concertos and the conventions regarding the three-movement form. Displaying virtuosity was a key issue for the composers of student concertos. These virtuosic passages appear to be almost always uniform with a formula developed at will, without being mingled with other formulas. This leads to the question whether this is a characteristic of the concerto repertoire or a deformation due to the sorting filter. It also invites reassessment of the importance of the nineteenth century virtuosic concerto in comparison with the symphonic concerto of the nineteenth century.Item An interview with Jordan Nobles(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Koerbler, SashaVancouver composer Jordan Nobles writes spatial music. Inspired by the architecture of a specific public venue, he utilizes its acoustic qualities to produce a motion of sound that will surround the audience—immerse it in music—and enable its members to freely move within it. Having composed almost a hundred works, not all of them spatial, he has mastered a technique of “hearing” the acoustic potential of a specific venue and crafting a composition that will effectively infuse its architecture with music. The original sound of Nobles’s music, as well as the openness and accessibility of the public venues attract large audiences to his concerts. Many Vancouver venues have hosted performances of his music, among them the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, the Rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the WOSK Centre for Dialogue, the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre, and the Pendulum Gallery located at a branch of the HSBC bank on West Georgia Street. Nobles’s music has also been performed throughout Canada, the US, Europe and Asia, engaging symphony orchestras, choirs, chamber ensembles, and soloists. At the age of 42, Nobles has been commissioned over twenty times, and counts over fifty performances of his works per year, some of which have led to CD recordings. He is a co-Artistic Director of the Redshift Music Society and has been organizing and presenting concerts of new music for the past ten years. On November 5, 2011 the Society presented a concert at the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library. The concert was part of the “Vertical Orchestra” series, conducted by Leslie Dala. It featured two compositions by Nobles, Hive and æther, the latter receiving its premiere.Item An interview with Christopher Butterfield(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Rayner, Mary-Ellen; Yang, CrystalOn November 14, 2011, we [Rayner and Yang] interviewed composer Christopher Butterfield in his office at the University of Victoria. He started his musical life at the age of eight as a chorister in King's College Choir, Cambridge, and decided he wanted to be a composer at the age of eighteen. He has always had an interest in performance, whether he was fronting a rock band, conducting, making performance art, or reciting sound poetry. As performers ourselves, we were especially interested in his relationship to performance and performers: In Montreal this fall, he reprised his acclaimed interpretation of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, and in May he will be giving a recital of Erik Satie's Socrate in Toronto. In addition to performance, we asked him about literature, his own compositional language, and specifically his 2009 piece, Bosquet, written for twenty-two flutes and one cello.Item Constructing Robert Johnson(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Lorre, SeanRobert Johnson — at least the Robert Johnson that is knowable today, one hundred years after his birth and nearly seventy-five years after his death — is best understood as a discursive construction formed by generations of critics, fans and scholars. Faced with this dearth of historical facts, many writers — having nothing else to go on other than the sound of his voice and his words — imagined psychological profiles of Johnson from their interpretations of his lyrics and their own preconceived notions of black culture. In this regard, "Robert Johnson" can be thought of as an empty/ied signifier, at once a man, a voice, and a blank slate. This study focuses on the formation and development of the Robert Johnson discourse in an attempt to trace the ideological assumptions, hermeneutic frameworks, and narrative strategies that facilitated a construction of Johnson by addressing representative selections from the Johnson literature by John Hammond, Samuel Charters, Greil Marcus and others over a span of roughly sixty years. Throughout theses writings the scant historical facts of Johnson's twentyseven years of life have been modified, manipulated and at times fabricated to serve a romantic narrative in which this poor, virtually unknown/unknowable bluesman stands in as the antidote to generations of commercialization and alienation. Whiles these works consider the historical figure and the music, in essence, it is the embedded layers of meaning and signification that critics and fans have poured into the "Robert Johnson" that reflect back at us most clearly.Item An interview with Jeff Enns(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Gillis, IainJeff Enns has won a number of composition competitions and had his music performed across North America, as well Ireland, the U.K and Japan, and was recently the composer-in-residence for the Canadian Chamber Choir. He has been widely commissioned, by groups that include Victoriabased Vox Humana. It was that choir’s director, Brian Wismath, who first introduced me to Jeff and his music. Jeff teaches violin at the Beckett School in Kitchener, and is music director of St. James Lutheran church in Elmira, ON. In his typically generous way, he agreed to speak to me on the phone from his home in Elmira, where he lives with his family and is a stay-at-home father of 2, in late October 2011.Item Handel’s Messiah as Model and Source for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Carr-Richardson, AmyBeethoven had the highest regard for Handel, claiming on more than one occasion “he was the greatest composer who ever lived.” Beethoven’s knowledge of the earlier composer’s music was considerable. In addition to the direct influence from Handel’s music that may be traced with Beethoven’s variations on one of his themes, direct transcriptions of his fugues, or the general evocation of Handel’s style in Beethoven’s choral fugues, this article proposes that Beethoven may have borrowed specific musical ideas from Handel’s Messiah and reworked them for use in his own Missa Solemnis. The method by which Beethoven may have adapted materials from Handel’s music includes the use of composite melodies, whereby a single melodic line is presented by different voices and in different registers. Sketches for the Gloria of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis indicate that Beethoven considered using this type of voice-leading technique in adapting the opening melody from Handel’s chorus “And the Glory of the Lord.” Analytical examples illustrate how these composite statements of the borrowed melody could have been incorporated in the Missa Solemnis, and further, how the fugal theme of Beethoven’s Gloria may consist of a ”composed out” version of Handel’s theme. Beethoven’s music plays on the original imitative relationships found in Handel’s “Glory” chorus and extends them, in an abstract sense, by creating counterpoint from the borrowed melody.Item Biographies(Musicological Explorations, 2012) Carr-Richardson, Amy; Kimura, Kiyomi; Lachat-Sarrete, Priscille; Lorre, Sean