Jonathan D. Bellman

The exotic in western music

Exoticism has flourished in western music since the 17th century. A blend of familiar and unfamiliar gestures, this vibrant musical language takes the listener beyond the ordinary by evoking foreign cultures and forbidden desires. In this collection, musicologists explore the ways in which western composers have used exotic elements for dramatic and striking effect. Interweaving historical, musical, and cultural perspectives, the contributors examine the compositional use of exotic styles and traditions in the works of artists as diverse as Mozart and George Harrison.

The style hongrois in the music of Western Europe

A study of the development of the style hongrois (Hungarian style), a specific musical language used by Western composers from the mid-18th through the 19th centuries (including Weber, Schubert, Liszt, and Brahms) to evoke the performances of Hungarian Gypsies. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. P

Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis

Nineteenth-Century Piano Music clarifies some theoretical concepts, debunks some longstanding myths, and above all, stimulates the readers intellectual curiosity about the piano repertoire of the 19th century. While our emotions tell us that this repertoire is thrilling to hear and exciting to play, our intellect demands explanations, some of which are provided in the essays in this collection.

After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest

Poets and philosophers have often wonderingly noted music’s miraculous and paradoxical ability to express the ineffable. However, the mechanics of historical musical expression, relevant though they are, are not addressed. By the mid-nineteenth century, the expressive vocabulary of western instrumental music—closest to the inexpressible itself, since it did not rely on words—was highly developed and well understood, encompassing conventions of genre, key, texture, and individual musical figures. For example, a particular horn gesture would reference not only horns themselves but the hunt and all the outdoor vigor associated with it, and a barcarolle evoked not just the Venetian gondolier’s serenade but also the intimacy of the couple in the boat, the sweet lapping of the wavelets, and the blissful contentment of a carefree afternoon on the canals. Emotions were thus accessed by reference to the more quotidian aspects of life with which they were associated. Today, though, much of this language has been forgotten. Ultimately, what to many of us sings of the Infinite might in its own time have evoked something far more explicit or even everyday, and (as Mendelssohn believed) it was music’s specificity that made meanings impossible to discuss, not the opposite. Thus, musical expressions of the ineffable and thoroughgoingly effable are far closer than we might suspect, with perhaps the key difference lying in the musical and cultural experience of the listener, not in the music itself.

Introduction: The Hidden Soundtrack of the Long Nineteenth Century

The idea of musical depiction sits comfortably with devotees of such Richard Strauss tone poems as Don Quixote (1897) or Der Alpensinfonie (1915). Due to its inclusion in multiple editions of The Norton Anthology of Western Music, the earlier work is perhaps the better known, providing the first lesson everyone learns about the cleverness of Strauss’s orchestration: brass fluttertonguing to evoke the flock of sheep that assails the noble Don, angelic harp music for the Don’s vision of Dulcinea, tambourine shakes for the sassy country girl who mouths off to Sancho, and so on. The Alpensinfonie elevates the familiar formulas of nature in music to Olympian (or, well, Alpine) heights: a cloudy, subdued minor mode for night; a huge fanfare for the sunrise; different water effects for brook and waterfall; an E pastorale with wind and bird effects for a mountain meadow; and much more. Strauss’s mastery of the craft of tone-painting in these works is justly renowned. Descriptive instrumental music for the concert hall was not Strauss’s innovation, of course. By the turn of the twentieth century there was already a long-established tradition of music that used both topical references and transparently mimetic gestures. The usual view is that “program music” emerged in the mid-nineteenth century; earlier instrumental concert music of the standard repertoire (composed roughly between 1750 and 1850) is presented as a series of masterworks in supposedly abstract genres like symphony, concerto, sonata, and string quartet. Within this narrative, works such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 are viewed, with a certain aesthetic discomfort, as outliers of the “characteristic” type, and Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique is seen as both a programmatic French symphonic aberration and a prototype of a new genre. Such an understanding of the trajectory of art music is rooted in the aesthetic framework of late-eighteenth-century German Romantic Idealism, wherein mimetic music, incapable of conveying metaphysical truth, held an inferior position. By the 1850s, the conversation about mimetic music was reframed by the debate between the proponents of Brahms, Eduard Hanslick in particular, and the leading members of the New German School, Wagner and Liszt. The latter’s contributions as composer

Expressive and Narrative Strategies in the Descriptive Piano Fantasia

Even though the antecedents of the genre of the “descriptive fantasia” date back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was as a genre for piano that it came to fullest fruition, beginning with Franz Kotzwara’s Battle of Prague, composed around 1788. Striking a balance between modest technical demands and dazzling effects, this famous work served as a model for many other consumer-targeted pieces that depict battles, natural disasters, and other momentous events. Such pieces display both remarkable creativity in their depictive effects (various kinds of military ordnance, climatic phenomena, sighs and sobs, bells, and much more) and great resourcefulness in their formal paradigms, including intertextual uses of musical quotation and polygeneric construction. Descriptive fantasias are all but forgotten today, but many of the musical developments usually credited to celebrated composers were first seen decades earlier in these ephemeral middlebrow works.

Ongherese, Fandango, and Polonaise: National Dance as Classical-Era Topic

National dances—or “character” dances—have remained on the periphery of studies of the eighteenth-century musical vocabulary of topics and styles, much as the countries from which they hailed were viewed as tangential to the European mainstream. Yet, dances such as the ongherese, fandango, and polonaise carried affective content beyond their nationality. The stereotypes associated with these three countries—Hungary, Spain, and Poland, respectively—illuminate what composers sought to project in their uses of such dances. The ongherese had a dual cultural significance, evoking both Hungarian national pride and the fierce independence of the Gypsies who usually played it—eventually developing into what became the nineteenth-century style hongrois. The use of the fandango went beyond local color to imply the more negative elements of an older Spanish stereotype—including arrogance, haughtiness, and the unbridled exercise of power—both directly and as mocking irony. In contrast, the polonaise—as a noble presentation-step for couples—could be played “straight” in instrumental music, but gained a comedic significance when used by opera composers to mock the idea of dignity à deux, whether in a context of flirtation or quarreling. Thus, the uses of these dances meant more than their national associations, and their broader meanings need to be incorporated into the growing topical lexicon.

The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (review)

the irony between Westerkamp’s intentions and the reception and perception of the piece. While there is not really a significant distinction in the responses if only gender is considered, job experience and educational focus seem to play an important part in determining how a person might receive a particular musical work. In the most philosophical essay of the collection, Linda Dusman ponders the effect of acousmatic or tape performances on the gendering of the listener. She suggests that the lack of active performers on stage in tape performances creates an awareness of self as listener that is homosexualizing to some extent. This creative essay attempts to explain why audiences and composers alike moved rapidly away from pure tape music performances. The final essay in this book is a piece by Marcia Herndon in which she explores the impact of various movements in musicology and anthropology on music and gender studies. Her long-time emphasis on a holistic approach and advocacy for the recognition of the complexity and fluidity of lifetime situations provide an appropriate theoretical summary to this eclectic and dynamic book. In the end, the idea which resonates throughout all the essays is the notion of identity: how it is constructed in different places and times; and, in particular, the triangular relationship between gender, music, and the construction of identity. By using authorial process and subjectivity as a fulcrum (enabled by “the conversation”), Diamond and Moisala have managed to weave what could have been a disparate and disorganized volume into a coherent and engaging collection that can and should be used in a variety of different kinds of university courses in departments ranging from Women’s Studies and Anthropology to Music and Folklore. This collection deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in any aspect of the nexus between music and gender.