Musicological Explorations, Vol. 07 (2006)
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This issue was first published in 2006 and later released digitally in 2009.
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Item From the editors(Musicological Explorations, 2006) McNeil, Bethany; McRae, JenniferItem Item New perspectives on Schubert's symphonic openings(Musicological Explorations, 2006) Lockey, NicholasOn the surface, many aspects of Schubert's Fifth symphony D.485 (including the reduced scoring and similarities between Schubert's minuet and the third movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 K.550) seem to fall outside the course of Schubert's previous symphonies and look back to the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Yet the opening four measures of this work, and their subsequent treatment, occupy a significant position in Schubert symphonic output, uniting trends in the earlier symphonies and pointing forward to important elements in several of the later ones. Examining some of the most common options for beginning a symphony in the decades leading to the composition of the Fifth symphony, this essay emphasizes the relative novelty of beginning a symphony with an in-tempo preface. Some of the closest precedents to Schubert's example come from the finales of his own Second and Fourth symphonies. In addition to transferring the concept of an in-tempo preface to the opening movement, the Fifth symphony demonstrates Schubert's ongoing efforts to integrate the opening of his symphonies into the subsequent musical discourse, a trend made evident through analysis of his entire symphonic output. After demonstrating the Fifth symphony's continuation of lines exploited in Schubert's previous symphonies, this study highlights the unique contributions that the Fifth symphony's opening made to the mixture of ideas from the early symphonies upon which the procedures in the later symphonies are based. The function of the Fifth symphony's opening measures (neither purely introductory nor truly thematic) also introduced a key element of ambiguity common to several of the later symphonies that was lacking from the openings of Schubert's other early symphonies. This paper reveals the Fifth symphony to be a work that draws upon Schubert's past accomplishments while looking forward to his future achievements.Item The music of the Music Box Revues(Musicological Explorations, 2006) Bomback, LarryRevues, a type of musical theater imported from France, were big business on Broadway during the first decades of the twentieth century. Florenz Ziegfeld popularized the exciting format in 1907, when he staged his first of what would be many annual Follies. Music contained in these Follies was essentially an amalgam of recent songs written by popular composers.Irving Berlin, in fact, had been writing individual songs for Ziegfeld as early as 1916, and composed much of the music for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920. Thus, by the time Berlin started penning his first Music Box Revue in 1921, he certainly felt comfortable working in the genre. Nevertheless, Berlin and co-owner Sam Harris made a concerted effort to differentiate their new revue from contemporaneous endeavors conducted by Ziegfeld, The Schubert Brothers, George White, and a host of other producers. By taking advantage of the intimate dimensions of the Music Box Theatre, deemphasizing the focus on nudity, and most importantly, creating shows centered around music, Berlin and Harris succeeded in raising the caliber of the revue genre to a higher artistic level.Item Aspects of time in the later music of Morton Feldman(Musicological Explorations, 2006) Jurkowski, EdwardDuring the 1960s, Morton Feldman abandoned the elements of indeterminacy that had characterized his scores since the early 1950s and instead began a remarkable compositional journey in which he relied on his intuition and acute sense of orchestration to create works of ferocious difficulty in which every note and rhythm was notated to formidable precision. Concomitantly, Feldman's composition also became increasingly greater in duration—although given Feldman's life-long predilection for painting, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of his works in terms of space rather than duration. While it has been frequently acknowledged that Feldman's passion towards Turkish rugs played a vital role in how these expansive compositions from his last decade are structured, in this paper I argue that their design may be more profitably explained by studying the composer's deeper appreciation of the large canvases of such painters as Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. For instance, uncovering Feldman's relationship with these New York-based painters proves valuable to not only comprehend his frequent use of the term "scale" to describe the form and length of these expanded musical compositions (an obviously problematic expression, given its association to portray the visual instead of the temporal art of music), but also the rationale behind his conscious attempt to disorient memory in his late works, an attribute that directs to what is Feldman's crowning compositional achievement—namely, a innovative means to experience musical time.Item Biographies(Musicological Explorations, 2006) Lockey, Nicholas; Bomback, Larry; Jurkowski, Edward